Interaction of NE Backup and HSM

[rkerr]

Does the backup program backup HSM stores? If so, is there any way for it not to?

As I plan our backup strategy this piece of information is very important.

[rkerr]

keep this thread alive....

[Rich Graves]

Yes.

No.

If you have a nontrivial amount of mail, you shouldn't be counting on backups for disaster recovery. Restoring your whole system from backup would simply take too long. Look at things like SAN snapshots instead. Backups are for end-user and sysadmin mistakes regarding individual accounts.

You could choose to put your db, indices, and newer mail on expensive storage with async replication, and your HSM backstore on cheap SATA. If your HSM dies, then so be it. Bring your system back up immediately with the replicated copy, not by restoring backups. Zimbra will continue to work, though it will give you n error if you attempt to access messages on the absent HSM LUN.

[rkerr]

darn.

Message store is expected to grow to 1.5TB over time.

I am already doing a whole system hot backup every 24 hours. I was hoping that by separating the HSM from the main message store I could continue to do this as we grow. Perhaps I should just do a system only backup/restore to the hot backup and then sync the message stores???

SAN snapshot hardware is out of budget.