[CentOS] Backup solution to backup /var/spool/imap above 150GB data

[Les Mikesell]

Agnello George wrote:
> Hi
> 
> We have  an issue with one of our clients , they have a mail server with 
> the  /var/spool/imap partition as 150 GB . They need to take 
> differential  backup on to /backup partition ( a different HDD  of total 
> 250 GB space )  . We have tried dar , rsync, rdiff and impasync . But 
> its is not sufficing the need as to take a lot of time and consumes a 
> lot of I/O .
> 
> Is there any back up solution that you can think of , that can work in 
> this situation  - open source or proprietary     

If you are just concerned about a single disk failure you could set up RAID1 on 
the disks (with some downtime to rebuild...) to keep the copy in realtime with 
little loss of speed.

Rsync should work as well as anything for snapshots but you might need to update 
to a 3.x version to speed up handling large numbers of files.  The 2.x version 
included in Centos will read the entire directory tree into memory before 
starting the comparisons and copies.  The rpmforge repo has a packaged 3.0.7 
version but I haven't tried it.

-- 
   Les Mikesell
    lesmikesell at gmail.com