Quote:
Originally Posted by jholder  This is a little editorial:
It is good admin etiquette to backup. In the open source edition, it doesn't include and automated backup process, but you CAN backup your files!
All information is most likely located in the /opt/zimbra folder. If you stop zimbra, and simply tar up the folder stick it in a different location, then you are good to go!
I cannot stress enough to our valued users, TAKE TIME TO BACKUP!!!
Let's take a failed upgrade as an example.
If you upgrade from 4.0.x to 4.5 and it fails (for any reason), it may be possible to install your 4.0.x over your failed upgrade and get it working. HOWEVER, you now *may* have tables in the db that are not active, and may cause you future upgrade headaches.
We love helping, and providing the very best support in the open source community, but it's important that you keep your info safe.
So, to sum it up: before you perform any sysadmin maintenance like upgrades, injections, or anything else, take time to backup.
You may be down a little longer, but you'll be better in the end.
Sincerely,
john  |
This is the one area that I think the Zimbra folks have it unequivocally wrong. The difficulty in backing up Zimbra stems from the fact that this feature set was restricted to the network edition only.
I don't know of any large scale (100+) mailbox Open Source installations. I think everyone corporate is pretty much mandated to go to NE if they have a large corporate base. I really feel that long term the lack of the live and per mailbox backups is a huge issue for the open source Zimbra community. I think witholding this feature makes it less likely that there will be robust backups and more likely that there will be a catastrophic failure.
Finally LVM snapshotting is your friend.
Edit: To be fair to Zimbra folks, this is scoped more closely to upgrading. cp -r is a definite must before doing any sort of upgrade, NE or OS. I know that mailbox by mailbox backup/restore is typically a enterprise activity, but I think there needs to be more thought behind mandating a standard way to backup Zimbra OS edition. Even if it is just "always make /opt a lvm with snapshot ability. Back in my IT consulting days, I can't count the number of times that we had people who thought they had a good backup, but never tested them, or just happened to have a failed backup right before a major outage.