Hello!
I am adding to this thread as we are discussing this same issue and it's a go/no-go issue for us. Doing cold backup is not really an option, and as it stands now, neither is the commercial version*. So, i have read a little and eveyone basicly says that scary things might happend if i backup a running Zimbra install
Scary things is something i genreally wan't to avoid, but it would be nice to now in mor detail what these scary things are.
Say a do an rsync on the entire /opt/zimbra while it's running, and the later on just stop zimbra, rm /opt/zimbra and moving the backup-copy into it's place. I understand that there would be som mails in mysql that is not on disk, and vice versa, but would anything more severe happend (a few mails that "cannot be opened" is pretty acceptable given that the entire RAID would have failed to get me there)? Is it possible that, say, the database would totally corrupted in the backup and the backup totally unusable?
I have tried this operation on a test system under moderate load a few times and it works acceptable every time ....
And please exuse my english
//Joakim
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*(we would only use the backup-feature and paying yearly for 103 accounts (not users, mind you, accounts) just to get a backup feature seems a little har for managament to accept)