ZCS-NE : rsync /opt/zimbra/backup

[breverend]

Anyone got any idea ?

[ewilen]

Since you're using -v in your rsync I believe you can tell, in the output, whenever a hardlink is identified. This might help you investigate further--just look at the corresponding files on the source and copy, and determine if they're hardlinked on the copy same as the source. (ls -i is helpful here.)

But...hang on there. That du output you just posted is from your source machine. This is no longer a question of how rsync works, but just "why are the backups taking up so much space on zimbra?" The answer there is, unless you've modified your zimbra crontab to use the --noZip option when doing backups, you don't get any hardlinking across different full backups.

Just do a search on nozip. This thread's probably the main place to look: 6.0.2 Huge increase in disk usage?

[dmcentire]

Just in case this helps someone, I discovered the "hard way" that the rsync backup method didn't work in my case. The rsync doesn't copy all the files (I think maybe some are busy, not sure) and the backup system, although rsynced daily, did not start or function properly when our primary ZCS hardware failed.

I discovered that there are scripts that do an rsync, stop the ZCS server, do another rsync (to get those busy/in-use files) and then start up the server again.

This backup method seems to work very well. I am not talking about backing up the /opt/zimbra/backup/ directory, I am talking about the entire /opt/zimbra/ directory to a standby server.

If you do use this method, BE SURE TO TEST the functionality of your spare server to ensure all is good. That's where I slipped up.

Dennis

[ewilen]

I am not talking about backing up the /opt/zimbra/backup/ directory, I am talking about the entire /opt/zimbra/ directory to a standby server.

It's been mentioned many times on the forum (and probably elsewhere) that backing up /opt/zimbra live to a standby server won't work. But this thread is about backing up /opt/zimbra/backup, and for that purpose rsync works fine.

Since you have Network edition, you may want to look at How to: cold standby server (no cluster). There may be a few other threads on the same concept, with varying degrees of automation.

The basic idea is, you create a backup server configured more or less identically to your production server, and you leave it shut down. Then you rsync your /opt/zimbra/backup directory to it. To bring the backup online, you start it up and do a restore.