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

Wed Feb 24 11:58:47 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 4:57 PM, Eero Volotinen <eero.volotinen at iki.fi>
> wrote:
>>
>> 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!)


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--
Eero