Backup and restore

[Tempo]

Dear All,

I would like to know if there is a "native" mechanism withing OX to backup and or restore mails.

i've seen on the Web commercial products that save emails from OX.
Otherwise I would just backup the directory /var/spool/cyrus

Any idea is welcome

Regards

Maurice

[Martin Heiland]

Hi Maurice,

a simple backup/restore mechanism is implemented in OX Express Editon. This saves all your databases, e-mail and system configuration data to restore it to a clean installation again. This product is currently in public beta, you're welcome to participate and provide you feedback
With the current version, the backup/restore functionality is really beta but it will be finalized with the official release. This will also be contributed to the community via cvs.

[Tempo]

What about the ASE version

Dear Martin,

just today I downloaded the Express Edition and started to play with it.
I've read there is a backup/restore utility and I will check it.
I was wondering more on the ASE version.
Does it implement something for backup/restore ?

Maurice

[Martin Heiland]

No, the OX5 ASE has no native backup restore onboard. As you already stated - there are some commercial 3rd party application doing this task.
That has to do with the complexity of a OX5 installation, with OX Express, every service is known before and everything works on one machine with no prior migration history. OX5 often works as a central server which also manages authentification via LDAP which ist not exclusively used by the Groupware but by other services. This is only one example why backup & restore is a more complex task in such an environment, thats why some backup specialists have taken over this task. OX Express is also designed as a out-of-the-box solution in a less complex environment which does not require a complex backup mechanism. For example, if the server breaks down because of a hardware failure, the user is able to install new from CD and recover the latest backuped state to the whole system, not incremental backup/recovery.

[Daniel Halbe]

In commercial productive enviroments I prefer the backup solutions from SEP because they're very modular, java-based and you've the ability to customize them to fit your enviroment. In addition SEP allows single mail(box) restore for OX servers and many other nice features

http://www.sep.de/home.php

If you only want to backup the mails (the other data like contacts, users, and so on should not been backupped hope this is only a test enviroment ) you can do this with simple bash scripts and hunderds other good solutions.

You should always shutdown cyrus while backupping with simple scripts - if you do not your backup is perhaps inconsistent.

Nice trick:
First do a backup while cyrus is running, then shut down cyrus and backup the files that have changed during the first run. --> Very short downtime + consistent backup

Short example:

#!/bin/sh
#simple semi-hotcopy cyrus backup in a folder
#Author Daniel Halbe
#Use on own risk and only after testing with testdata!
 
echo "cyrus backup starts"
echo "go for coffee"

echo "       create some directories"
rm -rf /home/backup/cyrus
rm -rf /home/backup/sieve
mkdir -p /home/backup/cyrus/lib
mkdir -p /home/backup/cyrus/spool
mkdir -p /home/backup/sieve/spool
 
echo "       first rsync run"
 
rsync -r /var/lib/cyrus /home/backup/cyrus/lib
rsync -r /var/spool/ /home/backup/cyrus/spool
rsync -r /var/spool/sieve /home/backup/sieve/spool
 
echo "plug out phone"
echo "   halting cyrus"
/etc/init.d/cyrus stop
 
echo "       second rsync run"
rsync -r /var/lib/cyrus /var/backup.d/preliminary/cyrus/lib
rsync -r /var/spool/cyrus /var/backup.d/preliminary/cyrus/spool
rsync -r /var/spool/sieve /var/backup.d/preliminary/sieve/spool
 
echo "       start cyrus"
/etc/init.d/cyrus start

Again, this is very simple, should not be used for productive enviroments because there are no checks if daemons fail to start or anything other happens!

One other thing I want to point out because I see it often:
Never ever use tar for making backups of important data!!! If tar archives get corrupt they cannot be opened in a simple way... Buy storage and backup 1:1 or use other archivers...

Daniel