Mail back-up system

[Lowell Gilbert]

> >> 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.