Frequent backup scheduling

[mikelcu]

With our previous system (granted, mostly due to it's instability), we had incremental backups running surprisingly frequently (every 30 minutes). It sounds a bit mad, but it worked well to keep our window of uncovered time very small, and since incrementals only copied transaction logs, it did not cause any noticeable load on the server. Would there be any unforseen gotchas doing the same thing, maybe a bit less frequently, with Zimbra?

-Mike

[mmorse]

Seems a bit much, but two people here did hourly and bi-hourly: Incremental Backup Frequency
Though with 5.0.6+ there's zmplayredo (just mailboxd must be stopped to run).
Also vote for Bug 31536 - add ability to restore accounts not yet backed up (but still in redologs)

[mikelcu]

Yeah, we had the super-frequent timing before because our nasty Exchange instance had a habit of crashing and leaving a corrupted 60GB database. If you haven't experienced the pleasure that is trying to repair an Exchange DB, try running naked through a swarm of bees and you might get close. In that case, a full restore was by far the least painful solution and the 30-minute schedule gave us a tiny window for potential mail loss. Since Zimbra doesn't have the same horrible monolithic data file that led to all-or-nothing crashes, the value of frequent backups seems greatly reduced. OTOH, I'm not sure if there is anything really wrong with it either...

-M