Question about NE and Backups.

[dougconley]

Our Network Edition server is being backed up with Solstice to tape. Do to what we believe will be a heavily used server with lots of mail, we figure that we will not be able to leave 30 days of backups on the local disk, but maybe 14 days instead. I've been playing with restores and trying to get a feel for how Zimbra does it's backups and restores. Info on the server, Dell 2950, RAID 10 so I have only 2TB for mail storage and local backup. I'm anticipating well over 1 TB in mail after migrations are done.

Here's the question:
If we need to restore a full and few incrementals backups back to the disk from tape, how do I make Zimbra see it again.

If I understand correctly, one of the log files that is part of the backup schema contains a list of backups that have been done. It's part of the cron job is what deletes after the set time period. Is there a proper method for getting those back into that log file, or would I need to
1. Temporarily move the current backups to another directory
2. Move in the restored files from tape
3. Do the restore
4. Move the current backups back to the proper directory

I've also discovered that a Full may not necessarily be a Full. I added 86 new accounts. When the nightly backup ran, it did an incremental on the original 10 and a full to the new 86, so technically we don't have a "full" Full Backup, but a "partial" Full Backup. Is that making sense?

I've looked around and haven't found this exact answer, though I know others have to have run into this issue as well.

Thanks, for any help.

[jholder]

zmrestore has a -t option. You can point it to the target restore location.

[Klug]

You can also use the -z (or --zip) option to zip the blobs during backup.

(However, beware of this bug : Bug 22915 - full zmbackup of new account resulting from incremental backup does not honor --zip option)