Backup/Restore methods revisited

[mglenney]

I am trying to get my arms around backing up and restoring Scalix and am frustrated to say the least. I'm hoping that this thread can become "sticky" so that others don't have to go through so much trouble to get this info.

Here's the information I've been able to gather together:

Backup Script
http://www.scalix.com/wiki/index.php?title=HowTos/AutoBackupScript

This script is good stuff with the right intentions. It begins by dumping each users mailbox for easy 'per user' restores and finishes by doing a full backup for recovery from disaster. I like the first part but the second part shuts down the scalix server which is not an option for my shop. I think the full backup can be commented out without any ill effects. My other problem is that it was created for v10 and hasn't been updated on the wiki for v11. It was created as part of this thread:
http://www.scalix.com/forums/viewtopic.php?t=1922

That thread was last modified in Feb 07 but not since which is unfortunate because an update to the backup script was posted which looks to incorporate changes for v11. It's unfortunate that this thread seems to have died. Here's a link to the modified script:
http://www.it25.de/downloads/sx_dump

sxbackup
http://www.scalix.com/wiki/index.php?title=Admin_Resource_Kit#Backing_up_Scalix_with_sxbackup

For doing full backups of scalix. This is the official supported method for doing full backups of Scalix. It uses LVM snapshots so that the server doesn't need to be shut down. Haven't tried it yet but it may be the answer to my 'full backup' problem. .pdf documentation is not so great. Leaves alot of questions. Also, text based 'README' would be nice for those of us who don't run x windows on our mail server but not that big-a-deal.

Wiki on backup and restore
http://www.scalix.com/wiki/index.php?title=HowTos/BackupRestore

I guess this is the 'official' page on backing up and restoring individual mailboxes. Doesn't tell you a whole lot. You'll need to get your info from the man pages but it does point you in the right direction. Scalix 11 is mentioned but that's about it. Would be nice if Scalix would create their own script for exporting all mailboxes in this fashion. Most of the work is done already with the script at the top of this post. I know it isn't "officially" supported but how about doing that. Take a look at it. Certify it. Update it. Officially support it. Your customers want it. Or, at least, this one does.

I evaluated a bunch of different messaging/collaboration platforms before deciding on and purchasing Scalix. I never thought to see if there was adequate support for backup and never did I imagine that a product of this maturity would have these type of issues. Looks like I learned something.

Does anyone have anything to add here? Maybe something I didn't find or something am wrong about? Thanks ahead of time for your feedback.

Mike G.

[interways2]

I completely agree! Scalix has a very weak spot here; backup is completely neglected or pretty much unusable fo most admins...

Scalix, please come up with a viable backup/restore solution, preferably via SAC!

[florian]

Have you looked at SEP's Sesam solution and their Scalix plugin?

(www.sep.de)

Cheers,
Florian.

[btisdall]

backup is completely neglected or pretty much unusable fo most admins...

If this were true it would be a sad reflection on competence in our industry.

Scalix, please come up with a viable backup/restore solution, preferably via SAC!

The existing methods *are* viable (are there any SAs out there *not* backing their systems up? I doubt it), though I would agree that there's plenty of room for improvement.

Personally I hope that there isn't over-much development effort devoted to providing backup via SAC & instead the focus be on extending core backup/restore functionality using the 'toolkit' philosophy that's such a strength of UNIX/Linux.

Thoughts, anyone?

[jaime.pinto]

I too would like an improved backup/restore solution, preferably via SAC!
I'm one of those SAs that doesn't use any of the existing scripts. I simply backup the *whole* server to tapes every night, at least for now.
Jaime

[racmar]

Since my scalix runs in a virtual machine, I just backup the entire VM every night. This is very wasteful, and will make restoring a single email message or single user's mailstore painful. I would much rather run rsync ( like I do /w all of my other linux boxen ) or something similar, but I haven't had time to figure out how to do it yet.

In my opinion, it should be as simple as selecting a backup location ( via ssh or smb ), username/password and a backup interval in the SAC. That's it, scalix should take care of the rest. It would also be nice to have a gui for restoring everything from the entire server all the way to an individual email message!

This solution would be a true enterprise-level solution. Not requiring the admins to setup backup scripts and the rest. If I really wanted to, I could do more complicated things /w the already created backups from my solution above.

[mikevl]

Hi

There are many different backup senerios for Scalix. From backup to another disk on the same server, to rsync to another server to using LVM for either of the above to doing brick level backups using sxmboxexp. So where do you start.

The Linux operating system is so flexible that it would be difficult for Scalix to know how the system was configured to come up with a plan to "Standardize backups. I understand that the SEP sesam tape backup software does near to everything people want. Unfortunaly in the Linux space people don't want to pay for backup software and there is the problem.

LVM snapshots are an excellent way of getting a consistant copy of the message store. But how many people will have preconfigured LVM for backup use? From a survey of the IT companies that install Scalix in our country shows we have zero that have deployed LVM based solutions.

So what is standard in Scalix & what is standard in Linux?

Just a thought

Mike v

[dhobbs]

I know this thread is a few months dated but I thought I'd throw my 2 cents in here. I'm using Scalix 11.0.4.25 with just over 250 mailbox and a mailstore of 131Gb. I use LVM snapshots and I have to say that it is very effective. I've had absolutly no problems with this and my backup only takes about 8 hours to run. I've not yet implemented individual mailbox backups but I'm working on it now. Once the backup is run, they're rsynced off to a dedicated backup device.

One thing I'd like to see though would be a plugin for the SAC that could allow this to be run. But then again, mine runs on a cron job with the weekly ommaint script and so It's really quite effortless to do the backups.

[tsanchez88]

I also use the LVM backup option. My setup runs a cron job every night and then copies the file off to another location. When I get some time, I'm hoping to have my backup server initiate the snapshot and then use a linux client in BackupExec to then backup the whole volume. You do need to plan ahead and setup the LVM volume, but any major implementation of Scalix should be tested before putting somethign as important as an email server into production.

[bdinger]

I'll throw in what I'm doing, which I still don't know if it's crazy or not .

I'm running BackupExec 11d, and do nightly incrementals and weekly full backups of the Scalix server. This is all dumped to a autoloader that has 5 days worth of backups in it at any given time, and the previous weeks' full available. I've yet to try any of the seemingly very awesome scripts, and am not running LVM. So I'll "trust" backupexec for now.

Anyone else using Backupexec?

[Valerion]

1) Are you shutting down the server before you do a backup? If the Scalix services are running while your backup gets done, mail that's flowing through the system or being refiled while the backup runs may get lost or corrupted. I suggest you do a omshut before the backup starts and an omrc after it is done. That is why omsuspend gets used in LVM backups, it runs before the snapshot gets taken, halting all Scalix processes, so the snapshot itself is guaranteed to be consistent.

2) Make very sure your backup has the correct ownerships and permissions on all files. Scalix is VERY sensitive to this.

[bdinger]

1) Are you shutting down the server before you do a backup? If the Scalix services are running while your backup gets done, mail that's flowing through the system or being refiled while the backup runs may get lost or corrupted. I suggest you do a omshut before the backup starts and an omrc after it is done. That is why omsuspend gets used in LVM backups, it runs before the snapshot gets taken, halting all Scalix processes, so the snapshot itself is guaranteed to be consistent.

2) Make very sure your backup has the correct ownerships and permissions on all files. Scalix is VERY sensitive to this.

Thanks for the tip, not sure if it was geared for me, but maybe?

That's easy enough to do with bexec, I'll set it up today as the weekly "full" backup runs tomorrow. We'll see how that works out!

[Nexis]

I do the LVM snapshots and use omsuspend.
Now I want to restore my full DB what do I need to do.
Stop all services
Just copy it from tape back?? And chack aal permissions. And start Scalix??

[Valerion]

That should be all that's needed. Of course, I would do a test restore on a different machine first, to verify the procedure. On that machine, do a default Scalix install, but keep the same hostname as your live mailserver.