From owner-freebsd-questions@FreeBSD.ORG Sat Apr 24 04:14:45 2004 Return-Path: Delivered-To: freebsd-questions@freebsd.org Received: from mx1.FreeBSD.org (mx1.freebsd.org [216.136.204.125]) by hub.freebsd.org (Postfix) with ESMTP id D4D6616A4CE for ; Sat, 24 Apr 2004 04:14:45 -0700 (PDT) Received: from gen129.n001.c02.escapebox.net (gen129.n001.c02.escapebox.net [213.73.91.129]) by mx1.FreeBSD.org (Postfix) with ESMTP id 634DB43D45 for ; Sat, 24 Apr 2004 04:14:45 -0700 (PDT) (envelope-from gemini@geminix.org) Message-ID: <408A4C21.9040906@geminix.org> Date: Sat, 24 Apr 2004 13:14:41 +0200 From: Uwe Doering Organization: Private UNIX Site User-Agent: Mozilla/5.0 (X11; U; FreeBSD i386; en-US; rv:1.6) Gecko/20040119 X-Accept-Language: en-us, en MIME-Version: 1.0 To: freebsd-questions@freebsd.org References: <20040422085409.550702a3.ebudd@grokking.org> In-Reply-To: <20040422085409.550702a3.ebudd@grokking.org> Content-Type: text/plain; charset=us-ascii; format=flowed Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit Received: from gemini by geminix.org with asmtp (TLSv1:AES256-SHA:256) (Exim 3.36 #1) id 1BHL7L-0003Kw-00; Sat, 24 Apr 2004 13:14:43 +0200 Subject: Re: advice sought on tape backups with cyrus-imap X-BeenThere: freebsd-questions@freebsd.org X-Mailman-Version: 2.1.1 Precedence: list List-Id: User questions List-Unsubscribe: , List-Archive: List-Post: List-Help: List-Subscribe: , X-List-Received-Date: Sat, 24 Apr 2004 11:14:46 -0000 Ed Budd wrote: > Hi, all: > > Hoping for a "reality check" from anyone on the list with experience > in doing tape backups with cyrus-imap: > > I've got FBSD 5.2.1REL acting as a mail server running cyrus-imap and > wondering what the best (read: safest) method of backing up user > mailboxes to tape might be. Can I just dump/restore everything > under /var/imap or is there more to it than this, considering the > mailboxes are stored in cyrus db format? Does this matter when it comes > time to restore? Well, doing on-the-fly backups is always risky, though unfortunately hard to avoid at 24x7 operations. However, Cyrus IMAP stores the email messages in separate files. So all that can become inconsistent are the data structures in the DB files used for management and performance purposes. Now, Cyrus IMAP comes with repair tools for these DB files which can restore missing/inconsistent data from the actual message files. So backup/restore induced inconsistencies are normally no problem. Uwe -- Uwe Doering | EscapeBox - Managed On-Demand UNIX Servers gemini@geminix.org | http://www.escapebox.net