[SGIA]

I had the problem of backing up (daily) a group of 50 users' mailboxes and taking the server down by doing a cold backup is not really an option. I am using the community version. I am not a Linux guru by any means, however was able to fashion the following scripts that function just fine for my needs, and perhaps can help someone else looking for a similar functionality. I am also up for any "professionalization" that can be done by the real Linux guys seemingly abundant in the Zimbra cosmos.

I am using several steps here. First, a script to export a single user account using zmmailbox. This is used by the next script.

 #!/bin/bash
 # baccount.sh -- Script to export select Zimbra accounts
 
 USERNAME=$1
 TODAY=`date`
 LOGFILE="/backup/log/backuplog.txt"
 
 echo $TODAY  >> $LOGFILE
 echo $USERNAME >> $LOGFILE
 /opt/zimbra/bin/zmmailbox -z -m $USERNAME gms >> $LOGFILE
 /opt/zimbra/bin/zmmailbox -z -m $USERNAME getRestURL "//?fmt=tgz" > /backup/accounts/$USERNAME.tgz
 echo --------------------- >> $LOGFILE

The above is called using ./baccount.sh username@zimbradomain.com and outputs a file username@zimbradomain.com.tgz to the directory specified.

The script to put this together is as follows.

 #!/bin/bash
 # get a list of all the accounts and create a script to 
 # execute the baccount.sh script with the email address 
 # of the user as a command line variable
 
 #use zmaccts and extract only the email address from the result
 #then concatenate the "/backup/./baccount.sh <emailaddress>" string for each account and write it to the file 
 
 /opt/zimbra/bin/./zmaccts | grep "@" | awk '{print "/backup/./baccount.sh " $1}' > /backup/accountbackup.sh
 
 # change permissions on the newly created script
 chmod 755 /backup/accountbackup.sh
 
 # Execute the newly created script - this creates a tgz file for each account
 /backup/./accountbackup.sh
  
 # this mounts an SMB drive of a neighboring win machine and copies the backups over - could be anything
 
 mount -t smbfs -o username=username,password=password //windowsMachineName/windowsShare /data
 cp /backup/accounts/*.tgz /data

The above script queries Zimbra for a list of users and generates a shell script called /backup/accountbackup.sh,
changes permissions on the newly created shell script and executes it, calling the baccount.sh script for each email address in the system and subsequently generating a complete mailbox export for each account.

In my example, it then mounts a remote smb volume and copies the backups off-server.

To restore one of these accounts, I use the command:

 /opt/zimbra/bin/zmmailbox -z -m UserEmailAddress postRestURL "//?fmt=tgz&resolve=reset" /backup/accounts/UserEmailAddress.tgz

I am sure this can all be made more generic and probably simplified, but I have found the flexibility of having these individual mailbox backups to be very very handy when coupled with a weekly full system backup. This procedure is run nightly.
The restore functions best when restored to an empty, newly created account.