Mail Box Data File path and Backup & Restore Utlity

[leenus]

Hi,

We have installed RHEL ver 3.0 AS with Scalix Community Edition ver 10.00

We have created all the mail boxes and mail nodes. All the mail boxes have started working fine. Now I need to backup and restore the data file of all the mail boxes from particular mail node. We would need the following.

1. Backup and Restore process of Message Store data from a file.

2. Also please provide the user's mail box data file with the extension and path.


Please let us know, If someone come accros the configuration of this please keep it updated.

Thanks in advance,

Leenus.C

[/b]

[jch]

Backing up individual user's mailboxes is quite different to backing up the entire message store. If you search through the forums you'll find that at least one person is using omcpoutu to backup individual mailboxes although this does have some issues, not really problems, that you'll see when you read about it. Unless you have a specific reason to back up individual mailboxes, you don't need to do this though -- everything is in the message store.

Backing up the entire message store is quite easy: get the message store into a consistent state; copy everything under ~scalix to the backup media. To get the message store into a consistent state you can obviously shut the scalix server down (/sbin/service scalix stop) although taking away a mail service is a little unfriendl.y. Alternatively, you can use omsuspend to stop activity; wait for a few seconds for outstanding actions to complete; take an LVM snapshot and then run omsuspend -r to let the server continue. Having got a snapshot you can back that up. Using rsync is quite popular: you can have quite efficient incremental backups that way. Don't forget to release the snapshot volume when you've done with it.

I'll let someone else answer about backing up configuation data as I always forget somthing!

jch

[prabhakar]

Hi,

Where is the Mail Storage path to look for the files?

Thanks,

Prabhakar.G

[jch]

Oops. Sorry forgot to mention that. The entire message store is usually under /var/opt/scalix. I'm sure this is mentioned in the install guide or the admin guide or both.

jch

[prabhakar]

Hi jch,

Thanks for your help.

I could actually seen the data files in scalix folder. But now my only doubt is how do we see the messages out of the backed or resored data. It seems to be in binary format. How do i see it as sent, received message of a person?

Is there a conversion available?

Regards,

Prabhakar.G

[jch]

Ahh. Now that's a different question :) The message store holds messages in a "binary" format as it's highly tuned for performance and interoperaibilty (mostly between IMAP and Outlook/MAPI).

Backing up ~scalix is done primarily to protect you against disaster -- if a swarm of locusts attacks your server you've got the back up to restore the complete message store.

If, on the other hand, you want to restore an individual user's messages or an individual message you have to work a little harder. If you have a complete backup, the usual technique is to restore the messages store on to some other machine and bring up a scalix server for that machine. You have to be a little careful to make sure that the restored messages store doesn't start sending messages of course. Once you've got a server up and running you can use omcpoutu to extract the messages for a single user or, if you want just a small selection of messages, delete everything except the messages you want to keep and use omcpoutu again. The messages copied out of the backup can then be restored to the user by running omcpinu on the main machine.

A more complex solution involves using the item structure server but that's too complicated to go into here. I don't remember if there's something in the knowledge base about that.

Some of the work that's going into the next release will make recovery of individual messages rather easier so you won't have to use the complete message store backup for that.

jch

[RickC]

However, from what I've read:(from the man page)

omcpoutu does not copy personal directories belonging to the user. Aliases and client configuration data is also lost.

So there is no real way to back up (and restore) a user's personal folders?

[ScalixSupport]

Don't be misled by the term "personal directories", that is an OpenMail feature that isn't exposed by the clients.

Using omcpoutu will backup all the contents of a user's mailbox. The configuration data refers to permissions and rules that have been set.

This is being addressed in the next major Scalix release due later this year.

Cheers

Dave

[Valerion]

So there is no real way to back up (and restore) a user's personal folders?

It depends here also on what you mean by personal folders. The Scalix server contains only the user's mailbox, Personal Folders (as used in Outlook) stores a .PST file on your local harddrive, and Scalix has no way of accessing that for backups. If that's the case, you will need to back that up seperatedly, maybe by storing the PST's on a network drive, or doing workstation backups.