Mail Server's BackUp Tool ?

[Steve Campbell]

----- Original Message ----- 
From: "Muhammad Nauman" <nauman at worldcall.net.pk>
To: "MailScanner discussion" <mailscanner at lists.mailscanner.info>
Sent: Thursday, May 11, 2006 2:42 AM
Subject: Mail Server's BackUp Tool ?


> Hello there All,
>
> This seams to be one great helping Forum 4 me - thankx 2 All.
>
> 1. After making a Good Stable Mailing Server - i m now looking for Good 
> Procedure to Maintain My Mails Backup.
>
>   In case i lost my DISK - due to crash or any other reason - i may have a 
> system saving my mail .
>
>
> 2. And Can i take Image of My - Installed and Configured OS  at some place 
> toooo ?
>
> so that  - I do'nt have to do all the configuration again and again ?
>
> Thankx in advace
>
>
>
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All of the suggestions I've read so far are very sound, and worth 
investigating.

If you were referring to new incoming mail in part 1, then a gateway of some 
type in front of your mailbox hub would take care of a mailbox hub failure. 
If the gateway failed, a secondary MX that points to the mailbox hub would 
take care of the gateway failure.

If you were referring to delivered mail, I would agree with the amanda 
suggestion. But this only works for delivered mail that was existent when 
amanda was ran. Determine how much time-wise you could afford to lose in 
delivered mail (of course the last email delivered  before the crash is 
always the most important and you never recover that one) and run something 
like rsync from cron  to backup the mailboxes. If you feel that a half an 
hour is the most you could afford, run rsync once every half an hour.

For part 2, I use mondo. Mondo can make a bare metal set of ISO files and 
either save them to disk or burn them immediately. I use the images options 
and move them to another NAS device. If I need them, I upload them and burn 
them, then just boot from the first image on CD/DVD and nuke the machine. 
This will restore the machine to the state it was at the time of running 
mondo (complete OS and everything). I can then use the rsync images to 
restore to within the time frame I set in cron or use amanda.

As far as off-site storage, here in the US, this usually gives us better 
insurance rates, so this is something you need to consider. All of the 
options above can transfer the images natively (without extra apps) to a 
site elsewhere. Just make sure you have whatever you need extract the images 
at the other site (for instance, a CD burner for the mondo ISOs).

I don't think you can ever plan for a complete recovery in hardware failures 
unless you have a lot of hardware and redundancy everywhere, but you can 
minimize the losses. I'm also sure I've overlooked something.

Steve Campbell
campbell at cnpapers.com
Charleston Newspapers