From owner-freebsd-questions@FreeBSD.ORG Thu Feb 9 18:07:04 2006 Return-Path: X-Original-To: freebsd-questions@freebsd.org Delivered-To: freebsd-questions@freebsd.org Received: from mx1.FreeBSD.org (mx1.freebsd.org [216.136.204.125]) by hub.freebsd.org (Postfix) with ESMTP id 43D7016A420 for ; Thu, 9 Feb 2006 18:07:04 +0000 (GMT) (envelope-from freebsd-questions-local@be-well.ilk.org) Received: from mail2.sea5.speakeasy.net (mail2.sea5.speakeasy.net [69.17.117.4]) by mx1.FreeBSD.org (Postfix) with ESMTP id 92F1743D6E for ; Thu, 9 Feb 2006 18:06:57 +0000 (GMT) (envelope-from freebsd-questions-local@be-well.ilk.org) Received: (qmail 9928 invoked from network); 9 Feb 2006 18:06:56 -0000 Received: from dsl092-078-145.bos1.dsl.speakeasy.net (HELO be-well.ilk.org) ([66.92.78.145]) (envelope-sender ) by mail2.sea5.speakeasy.net (qmail-ldap-1.03) with SMTP for ; 9 Feb 2006 18:06:56 -0000 Received: by be-well.ilk.org (Postfix, from userid 1147) id 8798328439; Thu, 9 Feb 2006 13:06:55 -0500 (EST) Sender: lowell@be-well.ilk.org To: freebsd-questions@freebsd.org 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> From: Lowell Gilbert Date: 09 Feb 2006 13:06:55 -0500 In-Reply-To: <65064.64.81.51.215.1139504956.squirrel@www.astrokid.com> Message-ID: <44lkwkxv7k.fsf@be-well.ilk.org> Lines: 34 User-Agent: Gnus/5.09 (Gnus v5.9.0) Emacs/21.3 MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset=us-ascii Subject: Re: Mail back-up system X-BeenThere: freebsd-questions@freebsd.org X-Mailman-Version: 2.1.5 Precedence: list List-Id: User questions List-Unsubscribe: , List-Archive: List-Post: List-Help: List-Subscribe: , X-List-Received-Date: Thu, 09 Feb 2006 18:07:04 -0000 > >> 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.