understanding backups

[bwm71]

I just took over a Zimbra 5.0.10_GA_2639.RHEL4_20081003014818 installation and I'm trying to understand the backups that are taking place. There is a nightly cron job backupZimbra.pl that runs and seems to backup the entire zimbra installation (for us /opt/zimbra/) to $backup_dir defined in said program. Some mechanism is also backing up accounts.xml and a sessions directory to the same location. I don't understand where this latter backup is originating and what the sessions directory contains that wouldn't be backed up by backupZimbra.pl.

I appreciate any help.

Thanks,
Brandon

[uxbod]

Welcome to the forums

Well, if it is a home brew script then we would need to know what was actually in those two xml files. If the whole of /opt/zimbra is being backed up then who knows

[bwm71]

The script that is backing up /opt/zimbra, backupZimbra.pl, contains

# This script can be used to backup Zimbra Collaboration Suite 4.0.0 GA #
# #
# Most recent version of this script can be downloaded from: #
# SourceForge.net: ZCS Tools #
# #
# Copyright (C) 2006 Chintan Zaveri #
# E-mail: smile\@sis.net.in #

so I thought it might be something commonly used. What it does is shut email services (/etc/init.d/zimbra stop) which seems crazy to have to do this and then it rsyncs /opt/zimbra to another location.

accounts.xml that is created in ZCS-backup contains entries like

<account zimbraId="8aea7572-0468-4070-981c-0be46300498d" email="brandon@geronimoalloys.com" latestFullBackupLabel="full-20090203.060005.994">

and the sessions/full-20090203.060005.994 contains the following

accounts/ ldap/ session.xml shared_blobs/ sys/

I was assuming this might be a standard backup procedure writing to ZCS-backup.

[phoenix]

Originally Posted by bwm71

What it does is shut email services (/etc/init.d/zimbra stop) which seems crazy to have to do this and then it rsyncs /opt/zimbra to another location.

The backup script will have to shutdown Zimbra during the back otherwise the database and mail files may not be in a consistent state in your backed-up files.

[bwm71]

Right, I understand the need to shutdown to make sure the database is sane. I'm trying to figure out what is creating the files mentioned in the ZCS-backup directory.

I understand what backupZimbra.pl is doing.