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Date:      09 Feb 2006 13:06:55 -0500
From:      Lowell Gilbert <freebsd-questions-local@be-well.ilk.org>
To:        freebsd-questions@freebsd.org
Subject:   Re: Mail back-up system
Message-ID:  <44lkwkxv7k.fsf@be-well.ilk.org>
In-Reply-To: <65064.64.81.51.215.1139504956.squirrel@www.astrokid.com>
References:  <200602090700.k1970DiJ095554@banyan.cs.ait.ac.th> <18e02bd30602090026h2e297677sc6742cbb653aede5@mail.gmail.com> <200602090910.k199AKB6011124@banyan.cs.ait.ac.th> <44irrozl0q.fsf@be-well.ilk.org> <65064.64.81.51.215.1139504956.squirrel@www.astrokid.com>

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> >> Considering we have only 200 users and 3000 messages per day, whatever
> >> would do.
> >>
> >> MTA is sendmail/milter.
> >>
> >> I plan to change that mailbox thing when I get budget for a new
> >> machine to play with (I don't want to take the risk to break the
> >> working configuration).
> >
> > Mailbox format might not be a bottleneck in this application.  It's
> > fairly efficient at appending new messages, and that is the only
> > common operation being performed on these backup mail spools.
> 
> I could see this as an advantage of the Maildirs format.
> 
> Since every mail is stored in its own file (versus concatenation in Mbox),
> it's much cheaper to backup. Just copy all the new/touched files, not all
> your mail.

Yes, that's a good point.  Because these files are *already* backups,
I assumed that they wouldn't be backed up themselves, but that may
well not be the case.

The other approach is the one I use for a lot of automatic archives on
my own system; rotate the files on an appropriate schedule.  [Where
"appropriate" is an administrative call, but probably related to the
backup schedule.]

> I just have a second disk on the server that I rsync everything to on an
> hourly basis.

That doesn't solve the original poster's mail backup problem, though.
In fact, the original problem from this thread is different than any
other kind of backup issue I had considered before.



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