Questions on Backup/Restore

[Harley77]

I'm in the process of refining a failover solution for our Zimbra Install (Network Edition). Right now, I'm testing a process of taking a sync of the Live servers Backup directory and restoring it to a standby system. (you can see a lot of what I'm doing in my sandbox page).

I do an incremental backup once every hour on the live system, rsync that across, then run a zmrestore -restoreToIncrLabel incr-XXXXXXX -a "all"

I have 60 accounts totaling about 25GB of total data. Now, if I do a restore to incr it takes about 2.5 hours on our standby machine (Dell P4 2.4Ghz w/1.5GB Ram). If I do another restore to incremental using the backup made just one hour later, it still takes 2.5 hours. So, essentially, it takes the same amount of time to bring it up to speed for one hour as it would for the entire system. Does this sound right?

[bdial]

isn't it still restoring the entire account? I don't believe restoring from an incremental just restores everything that's missing, I think it restores the whole account again.

[Harley77]

Yeah, thats what it looks like. Just wondering if there was a more time efficient method.

[Dirk]

What about abstracting the data to a SAN? Could you build two zimbra servers and have one of them powered down but have them both configured to use an iSCSI target the the SAN for their data? Would this work?

[bdial]

you might want to look at DRBD, theres a few threads on in you can search for drbd on the forums but this one is probably a good start

[SOLVED] Zimbra on DRBD

[Harley77]

I've been considering both, DRBD is an interesting proposition, however, I do not have an identical machine to our primary system, my choices are, make a Virtual server or utilize the P4 Dell workstation that has been serving as our backup machine thus far.

If we ever get a decent budget again, I do want to add a good SAN, but that just isn't in the cards right now.

If I wanted to mirror JUST the messages, so one machine had the same messages as another, could I just sync the store and index? Or is there more to it?

[bdial]

theres sql database stuff too.