Replicating Mailboxes (for archiving)

[catnipper]

I just configured Archive & Discovery on our production system to point to a Zimbra 6.0.1 GA which works just fine to archive inbound- and outbound mail.
This solution may certainly be considered a nice auditable solution for worst case scenarios and security issues if you have to follow up conversations from a legal standpoint.

Now I am still looking for a proper archiving solution:

1. Replicate items (mail, docs, calendars, docs, etc) from live system to an archive server (including folder structures)
2. Delete items from the production system not being flagged and older than X days
3. The archive server itself will be a Zimbra GA and authenticate users via LDAP based on the production server (uid=%n)
4. Users will have access to the archive using http only

Does anybody has experience doing this - there does not seem to be a native solution/Zimlet available?
I already found the following script on the forum to delete messages older than X days from mailboxes. It simply misses the function to parse for paged results (more: true) as the server limits the result to 1.000 records.

I just found a set of perl tools at IMAP Tools. I just have no idea how I could use them without knowing each single user password!

[catnipper]

Found this very nice solution that will only need some additional scripting and modification to make a nice archive solution working:

1. Run operation per user on LIVE box:
zimbra@mail1:~> zmmailbox -z -m uid@domain.com getRestURL '//?fmt=tgz&query=is:anywhere' > /tmp/uid.tgz

2. Copy file to ARCHIVE server or to a readable directory

3. Run operation per file on ARCHIVE server:
zimbra@audit:~> zmmailbox -z -m uid@backup.domain.com postRestURL "//?fmt=tgz&resolve=modify" /tmp/uid.tgz

Features:
update modified items, add new items
- read state for mails
- moved appointments
- includes addressbook entries

Limitations:
deleted items
- deleted items will not be deleted in archive (as expected)
modified items
- custom flags are not applied if they have not been created manually on the ARCHIVE server

ToDo's:
- Limit export to items by date - before X days (items that will be cleared due to archiving policy)
- Automate export for X users on LIVE system, import on ARCHIVE system, deleting items on LIVE systems upon success

ZCS-to-ZCS Migrations » Zimbra :: Blog

Anybody else having such an implementation up and running already?

[dalmate]

you should use rsync to create backup, with this you can backup all your server

[catnipper]

rsync: am I misunderstanding something - this does not include the metadata stored in the MySQL databases?
Can you give me a short description why you think this solution might be better - not only easier - than the one mentioned before?

[ArcaneMagus]

rsync would only be an option if you wanted to shut down your server to run the backup, it would take far more disk space since you would have to store an entire copy of zimbra for every user backup you took, and providing access to these backups would be a nightmare. In general I don't think that would work at all for what you are doing catnipper.