[bjquinn]

Well, you guys are great -- I haven't looked at this thread for nearly a year, but it's great to see we're getting somewhere! At any rate, something occurred to me while catching up on this rather important thread (after all, what good is anything if you can't back it up?!?). While we're waiting for the work on the Zimbra hot backups to complete I wonder if the following idea would minimize downtime while doing a cold backup.

1. Sometime like 2am run rsync to backup /opt/zimbra while zimbra is still running.
2. Shut down Zimbra whenever that finishes
3. Run rsync (copying changed files only, of course) to refresh your copy of /opt/zimbra, hopefully taking far less time than if there wasn't already a recent copy to refresh
4. Start Zimbra back up

Short and simple. That way, you minimize actual Zimbra downtime yet you still get a good, in-sync backup.

Would this work while we're waiting for the attempts at hot backups to materialize and stabilize?

-BJ Quinn