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

Wed Feb 24 11:27:29 UTC 2010
Eero Volotinen <eero.volotinen at iki.fi>

2010/2/24 Agnello George <agnello.dsouza at gmail.com>:
>
>
> On Wed, Feb 24, 2010 at 4:13 PM, Gavin Carr <gavin at openfusion.com.au> wrote:
>>
>> On Wed, Feb 24, 2010 at 10:38:32AM +0100, David Hrbáč wrote:
>> > Dne 24.2.2010 10:00, Agnello George napsal(a):
>> > > 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
>> >
>> > Is seems to me, that you are using mbox format. So, differential backup
>> > is hard to achieve. Migrate to maildir, every mail is a file, easy to
>> > backup differentially.
>>
>> rsync and rdiff should handle mbox format okay though. Though I agree
>> Maildir
>> is generally nicer for differential backups.
>>
>> Agnello, how long is "a lot of time"? A backup is always going to have to
>> walk
>> the entire tree and checksum (or at least stat) every file, so there's a
>> minimum
>> cost you're always going to have. How long does a 'find /var/spool/imap
>> -ls'
>> take, for instance?
>>
>> You might want to try brackup (http://code.google.com/p/brackup/). For
>> very
>> large trees of relatively small files it seems to significantly
>> out-perform
>> rsync-based backups. I've got brackup packages in my repository (see
>> http://www.openfusion.net/linux/openfusion_rpm_repository).
>>
>> Cheers,
>> Gavin
>>
> is it possible with " brackup "  to back it up to a different server on the
> same lan   instead of /backup  . Is there any documentation on the same .

rsync or rdiff-backup works on local disk or remote disk.(and other
backup methods too!)

--
Eero