[ale] backup/restore mail from USB external drive

[Jim Kinney]

Mail servers are hard to backup. I've setup nightly with hourly sync. That
worked OK until it got too busy. What I eventually used was dual systems
mirrored in DNS with split drive arrays in mirrors on each. A daily backup
then was sufficient. They were running several hundred messages an hour. I
imagine at hundreds per minute or higher this becomes no longer a backup
issue but a purely continuity issue.
On Feb 12, 2014 4:00 PM, "John Heim" <john at johnheim.com> wrote:

> On 02/12/14 10:38, Brian Mathis wrote:
>
>>
>>
>>
>> 'rsync' is still a good option to copy files back.  It does not do a full
>> check of files unless they already exist on the destination side, and even
>> then it checks the date and filesize before doing a full checksum.  If you
>> use the options, you can preserve timestamps, view progress, and easily
>> stop/restart the copy if needed.  I'd use these options: -av --progress
>> --partial.  When copying between local disks, it's just a version of 'cp'
>> that gives you a lot more options.  Also, I'd recommend running this inside
>> of a 'screen' or 'tmux' session so you can detach and leave it running,
>> and/or protect against the session getting dropped from the network.
>>
>> As far as step 5 goes, do you have enough physical space to add the new
>> drives next to the old ones?  Then you could make a partition for the user
>> data and stage it directly on the new drives.
>>
>> Incidentally, the point of a RAID is to be able to replace failing drives
>> without having to go through this process.  Is there any reason why you
>> can't just replace the failing drive and rebuild the existing RAID to it?
>>
>>
>>
> We have one  failed disk and one  with failure predicted.  This is a Dell
> machine and they recommend rebuilding the whole thing when that happens.
> There is something called "puncturing" which is actually a good thing. It
> allows the RAID5 array to keep running even  if 1.5 disks have failed.
>
> We just got unlucky and had two disks fail at the same time. Well, only
> one has actually failed.  The other just is in failure mode.
> P.S. RAID is not a backup and you should always have some kind of backup
> job running to external media regardless of the health of the RAID.
>
> Well, it's a mail server and nightly backups aren't good enough for this
> purpose. We don't want to restore from last night's backup and lose 8 - 10
> hours of mail.
>
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