Public Folders Backup - disappointing!!

[les]

I've tried a million ways to do this and the only decent way to achieve this is via a manual pst backup, which is awful. Especially since users who i have migrated over to scalix have not had to do manual email folder backups before.

Its is also especially painful as the scalix message store duplicates imported emails when migrating and has no adequate user level backup (i.e. restore a single directory or user). Yes i know about omcpinu and omcpoutu but that too is still awful!!!

Consider my problem......

I have a client, used to be using courier imap. standard tar backups, i could easily restore without drama. They had 7gb of mail.

i converted to Scalix to make use of the collaboration features. Thus when i migrated using standard imap tools (imapsync), and i got 14gb used in /var/opt/scalix/data.
Fine. i knew that was going to happen.

However, now remember that backups are awful and the only true user level backups come from using contributed "ombackup" and "omrestore" scripts.
(Yes i know about ISS and its features, but after days spent trying to follow it and still not being able to fathom it, which a hell of a lot of other people also have trouble with, that just doesn't stack up.)

So know i export users using ombackup (which uses omcpoutu) to .tra.gz files. Hence another 7gb.

Now ive got 21gb to backup. I need the "bricks level" user tgz's and 14gb of /var/opt/scalix/data because there's no easy way to track which directories are actually used for Public Folders. Add another 2gb for system data files to backup also.

And here's the compunding problem. 23gb is too much to fit on the tape. How can i justify to the client that they now need to spend $1000 on a higher capacity tape drive when they now they only have 7gb of mail? Thats all it shows in the SAC Console.

If there was an easy way to backup Public Folder Data, by knowing which actual unix level directory it is stored in without involving the client doing manual pst's, then i could exclude about 13gb of data and sanity would prevail.

Summing up.....

1. how can i backup public folder data from the server?
2. how can i find out the exact directories where public folder data exist?
3. is there anyway to reclaim duplicated space?

This is critical. I don't want to give a client Scalix, let them create Public Folders, and then look like an idiot when they need to restore them and i say...ummm...cannot do it unless you manually backup via pst......

[tripleB]

good points - any answers?

[les]

good points - any answers?

wait for Scalix 11 in November!!

At the moment i'm running a local dovecot imap server on the same box as the scalix one. Then i'm using imapsync to suck the mail out into it.
Im also using mboxadmin capabilities which allows me to get public folders synced across in this way.

Then i backup this store, in preference to backing up the undecipherable data directory in scalix.

However this solution is not the best, some message will not go across (without any reasonable explanation), many message flags are not supported and need to be excluded.

Holding out for Version 11 which will contain some imporved backup features.