1 Topic by marcovaldo

  • marcovaldo
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Topic: Backup concepts

Hi,

We want to backup a iRedmail server using dirvish (which uses
rsync plus hardlinks to deduplicate into a different tree for
every backup generation)

this produces a folder structure like
/hostname/yyyymmdd/tree/....
under this then would be the copy of the complete MailDir structure of the
iRedmail server at day yyyymmdd.

The idea is to use a 2nd dovecot (as a kind of imap r/o server) and
change the Maildir path by some kind of webscript(select day from list)
and reload/restart dovecot after this. So a second mail accound can be
used to peek into the emails as they have been at a specific day in the
past.

The main dovecot in the iRedmail installation stays completely unchanged.
The user has only two simple steps to step back in history:
1) select date (and tweak the dovecot)
2) access using a 2nd ("backup") imap
(I am aware that this is a single user solution)

Finally two questions:
- Could the above concept  work?
- What are you all using for backup of emails?

Best Regards,

   Marcovaldo
What b

----

Spider Email Archiver: On-Premises, lightweight email archiving software developed by iRedMail team. Supports Amazon S3 compatible storage and custom branding.

2 Reply by ZhangHuangbin

  • ZhangHuangbin
  • ZhangHuangbin
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Re: Backup concepts

marcovaldo wrote:

this produces a folder structure like
/hostname/yyyymmdd/tree/....
under this then would be the copy of the complete MailDir structure of the
iRedmail server at day yyyymmdd.

Will this backup procedure takes too much disk space? for example, if you have 10GB mailboxes in total, everyday it will generate a 10GB backup, and 70GB in total after 1 week.

3 Reply by marcovaldo

  • marcovaldo
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Re: Backup concepts

Will this backup procedure takes too much disk space? for example, if you have 10GB mailboxes in total, everyday it will generate a 10GB backup, and 70GB in total after 1 week.

No, it will not duplicate all. That is the nice thing about Dirvish:
All unchanged files are hardlinks to their orginal copy.
Only every new email in /cur folder of user will be saved
and of course the index files.

Also Dirvish allows an expire ruleset, and deletes the eldest snapshop automatically after a defined interval.

The advantage of this would be if an user remembers that he has deleted an important mail 3 days ago,
it will still be in the Dirvish tree of 3 days ago.(although it is gone of actual mailserver storage)

4 Reply by ZhangHuangbin

  • ZhangHuangbin
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Re: Backup concepts

OK.

Maildir path is controlled by Dovecot setting 'mail_location =', if you change it to the one you want, mails will be sync to that folder. Hope it helps.

5 Reply by marcovaldo

  • marcovaldo
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Re: Backup concepts

Hi,

Maildir path is controlled by Dovecot setting 'mail_location =', if you change it to the one you want, mails will be sync to that folder. Hope it helps.

Yes, thanks. I supposed something like that. But was not sure if there are other things to keep an eye on too.
Will report back how this develops further.

Note: A topic found in professional use of mailservers (even in small companies) might be:
- Long term (several years!) of mail backups for legal reasons (something like keeping
business records). In my country (Austria) this is not yet a big issue. But I know in Germany
(where they have a love for strong regulations anyway...) there is already such a law.
This opened a market for a few companies offering longterm-mail-backup solutions
(software or hardware appliances)

Best Regards,

    Marcovaldo

6 Reply by ZhangHuangbin

  • ZhangHuangbin
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Re: Backup concepts

How about a mail archive software like MailPier (free, open source)?
http://www.mailpiler.org/en/index.html

Looks like you cannot recover from MailPier (correct me if i'm wrong).

7 Reply by marcovaldo

  • marcovaldo
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Re: Backup concepts

ZhangHuangbin wrote:

How about a mail archive software like MailPier (free, open source)?
http://www.mailpiler.org/en/index.html

Looks like you cannot recover from MailPier (correct me if i'm wrong).

Thank you for the hint, this looks as if this would do what I need ..
Will give it a try.

Kind Regards,

      Marcovaldo