Backup of Scalix 9.x

[SidebandSamurai]

Hello Everyone,

I would like to do backups. Who would'nt. For now I would like to do backups for disaster recovery. I have attemtped to backup each users mail directory with one of those om commands, and was successfull, but one of my users is over 2GB. and that process took over 20 minutes. I have 3 such users in that area and it would take a long time to backup all the users data as well as backup the server.

Not to take into account that either I have to create a new mail node or have a standby system to be able to recover an individual message, its more time than what its worth. At least with a disaster backup, if they really want to pay me to restore that single message, I can still restore it if necessary, and I am backing up the data once.

I would like to outline a process and see what everyone thinks. I want to make sure that the commands I am running are the correct commnds for the following server configuration:

Redhat Fedora Core 4
1 Gig RAM
3 SATA 250G Hard Drives in RAID 5 configuration
/ = 10 Gig
/boot = 10 Meg
/var/opt/scalix = 460 Gig
2.5Ghz Pentium IV processor

Backup Server: Bacula 1.3.8 (www.bacula.org)

I am trying to keep the mail system on line as long as possible. LVM snapshots are not a vialable solution because of the LVM snapshot bug that causes kernel panics or system lock ups.

After 3 nights of research I have come to the consolution

=== Procedure ===

I will install the Bacula File Daemon on the Scalix Server so that my backup server can access the files.

At 2:00am I will shut down the mail service with the following commands (Issued from bacula when it starts the backup process)

Shutdown Web Interface

Code: Select all

/var/opt/jakarta-tomcat-5.0.28/bin/shutdown.sh

Shutdown Scalix Server

Code: Select all

service stop scalix

Bacula will backup the following directories:

Code: Select all

/var/opt/scalix
/etc

Bacula will determine automatically if its a full or an incremental and take the appropriate action.

After backup the following commands will be executed by Bacula

Start Scalix Server

Code: Select all

service start scalix

Start Web Services

Code: Select all

/var/opt/jakarta-tomcat-5.0.28/bin/startup.sh

Does anybody have any comments to confirm that this will be sufficient to backup the mail server for disaster recovery? I am open to any suggestions the community might have with my proposed procedure.

Thanks for everyones help

Sideband Samurai

[ScalixSupport]

It looks OK to me, just add

/opt/scalix
/etc/opt/scalix

to the list of directories to be backed up.

I don't need to mention this, but I do it anyway. No backup can be assumed working UNLESS THE RESTORE is successful. So, to try this out, I would recommend doing the following: Grab a (free) copy of VMWare, setup the host OS, create a VM for testing with identical configuration (so you can down the Scalix server or take it off the network), copy this "virgin" OS install so that you can return to the start phase later on if things don't work.

Then, try restoring to this VM and start it up. If it all works, congratulations. If not, we can figure it out.

Cheers,

Sascha.

[btisdall]

Grab a (free) copy of VMWare, setup the host OS, create a VM for testing with identical configuration

It's time I got my head around VMWare - which version do I need to download?

Cheers,

[ScalixSupport]

http://www.vmware.com/download/ws/eval.html

does it for me nicely ( I have a registered copy, of course.)

Cheers,

Sascha.

[btisdall]

Thanks Sascha.

[SidebandSamurai]

Sascha,

The VMware suggestion was an excellent Idea. I will give that a try.

Sincerely,

Sideband Samurai