[SOLVED] Simple backup question...

[dameron]

After a seamless upgrade to the .1044 release I went to perform the recommended backup from the admin console to be greeted with a message indicating that the admin console backups "cannot be used to restore a system that has lost all data."

That's fine, as far as I can tell, since I can run the backup from the shell whenever I need to do a manual backup, however do the automatic weekly full backups and incremental backups also have this limitation?

[mmorse]

The slight differences:
1)Admin console doesn't catch ldap data Bug 14069 - backups in the admin console should back up LDAP data -The admin console 'kinda' runs the same full/incremental backups as the scheduled. To that end zmbackup -l came about.

The cli zmbackup currently handles everything, but if a backup is executed from the Admin Console only the SOAP
call to backup the mbs is executed.

2)+ zmschedulebackup isn't the same as zmbackup in the arguments that can be passed to them Bug 7112 - zmbackup options should be available in zmschedulebackup options)

Read the below link, and you'll understand why that 'disclaimer' came about. Especially pay attention to the 2nd disaster recovery section (just pretend your working with 1 server). It's mainly because in order to use the mailbox backups, you have to first get a working ZCS install of the same version, clear mysql, & restore ldap (contained in the backups).
/docs/ne/latest/administration_guide/10_Backup_Restore.13.1.html
That really should be re-worded...but it's hard to compress all that information into once sentence

[dameron]

Thanks, that makes much more sense to me now. I did a test disaster recovery from backups before to another standalone server and it worked without a hitch and was a little surprised when I saw that message.

So basically the backups from the admin console can still be moved to another machine with a fresh install of the same version and restored as usual, but the mailbox backups won't be useful if your ldap/mysql is hosed?

[mmorse]

(zmrestoreldap) "The LDAP directory is backed up as part of either the full or incremental backup process. All accounts, domains, servers, COS, and other data are backed up. You can restore the LDAP directory without restoring the message server, and restore specific accounts to the LDAP server."

Guess it could also say "see the admin guide, backup section for more details about the disaster recovery process" -don't want to hard code a link that could change but http://www.zimbra.com/products/documentation.html is probably going to be pretty permanent.)