Zimbra backup procedure

[aldennis]

Hi,

Is it possible just to copy and paste the zcs folder in /opt/zimbra to an attached external drive. What I mean is, our zimbra server has the ubuntu-desktop installed. After performing "zmcontrol stop" could we just do the mouse clicks instead of running the script described in here
Open Source Edition Backup Procedure - Zimbra :: Wiki.

I'm very new to Linux and my only encounter with it is when I install ZCS.

Were running ZCS 6.04 open source in Ubuntu 8.04 guest in vmware server 2.0
Thanks.

[Hivos]

As long as you have a copy of the complete /opt/zimbra folder, you have a complete backup of your data. You may want to consider diving a bit deeper into Linux though... e.g. setting up a cronjob will save you a lot of time compared to repeatedly dragging&dropping a folder manually...

[emmaylots]

In order to do that, you may have to enable the root account and log in as root. If I remember correctly there is a backup application on Ubuntu desktop, you can use that too, just make sure it runs as root, else it won't be able to copy some files due to permissions.

[aldennis]

Ok, maybe I could do a script to shutdown zimbra then copy /opt/zimbra to an external hdd.

Does NTFS partition does not support symlink from ext3? I've encoutered this error while copying /opt/zimbra to a NTFS formatted external drive. Maybe I should format the external drive to ext3. Is that correct?

Thanks for your info

[aldennis]

Originally Posted by Hivos

As long as you have a copy of the complete /opt/zimbra folder, you have a complete backup of your data. You may want to consider diving a bit deeper into Linux though... e.g. setting up a cronjob will save you a lot of time compared to repeatedly dragging&dropping a folder manually...

Is that cron job a script that I could write on any text editor in Linux then allow the file to execute as a program by chmod or I should download a program to run the script?

[ewilen]

Don't use NTFS as it will not support hard links. Symlinks may also be an issue, not sure.

Best method of doing the copy will probably be rsync, since it will only copy the delta (changes) instead of having to recopy everything. There are also utilities (some based on rsync) that will save individual deltas so that you can restore to a specific backup.

However, if you have the luxury of being able to shut down Zimbra and only needing to restore the entire server to a periodic snapshot, then lvm and/or virtualization would be worth your while to investigate. In fact I've seen suggestions on the forums that there are ways of using lvm and virtualization that don't even require shutting down the services, but I haven't personally had time to investigate. See Zimbra OSE backup without stopping the services and Hot Backup Community Edition w/ DRBD.

EDIT: Also worth considering, VMWare Fault Tolerance, as mentioned here. But it's not free.