Re: Backup from huge Maildirs

["Maarten Vink" <vink@interstroom.nl>]

On Zo, 2 september, 2007 17:06, Michelle Konzack zei:
>
> Now I backup each night and for the /home it is no problem since the
> most files are big and each ${USER} backup has only 2-3 GByte except my
> ${HOME} which is very huge (26 GByte).
>
> My problem is the /Maildirs directory!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!  --  Argh!
>
> It taks to much time (over 5 hours) to do incremental backup using the
> rsync method.
>
> Can anyone tell me a PERFECT solution to backup 60 Maildirs (maybe
> increasing) which hold per $USER over 1 million files?

For this setup, rsync might not be the best solution. As someone mentioned
earlier, splitting the rsync so that it runs separately for each user will
probably speed things up.

Looking forward, you might want to try this if you have some free,
unpartitioned diskspace (or a spare server):
- Set up DRBD on two servers
- Use LVM on top of the DRBD device
- Use the LVM tools to create periodic snapshots of your mail partition

This way any changes are synchronised to the second server as they happen
(via DRBD), and you can recover old data almost instantly (by mounting one
of your snapshots).

Regards,

Maarten