What's the best possible email failover solution

[Chuck Swiger]

Bill Moran wrote:
> It's the mailboxes themselves that are difficult to get.  Best we've got right
> now is backing up the Cyrus mail folders using rsync ... but this is very time-
> consuming, and (thus) only done once a day.  In order for it to be done right,
> Cyrus has to be shut down while it's backing up.

Are you using mbox files rather than maildir-style mailboxes?

The latter uses one-message-per-file, and ought to work *much* better both in 
terms of performance and stability, and in terms of playing nice with the way 
rsync wants to back things up.

[ I don't think that stuffing email into a database is a particularly good 
idea since that means keeping large blobs of non-relational data floating 
around, something that the filesystem can do a better job of handling... ]

-- 
-Chuck