Backup strategies

[cyrus]

Hello! I'm planning to deploy the Open Source Edition of Zimbra and I'm thinking about a reasonable backup strategy:

For disaster recovery I would do a full backup of the zimbra directory every day (shutdown zimbra, make lvm snapshot, start zimbra, backup the files in the snapshot, delete snapshot).

But I want to have the possibility to easily recover individual mails that have been deleted by accident and to recover whole mailboxes. To do so one possibility would be to additionally backup the boxes individually (with zmmailbox -z -m $mbox getRestURL "//?fmt=zip"). But than I would need twice as many backup space as with the above solution alone.

Perhaps it would be useful to create a second "hidden" mailbox for every user, that gets a copy of all mails, so that a mail that has been deleted in the primary mailbox can be restored if deleted. But again this would take up much more disk space than needed.

Perhaps somebody here has a good solution for me? It has to work with the zimbra open source edition.

[phoenix]

Originally Posted by cyrus

Hello! I'm planning to deploy the Open Source Edition of Zimbra and I'm thinking about a reasonable backup strategy:

For disaster recovery I would do a full backup of the zimbra directory every day (shutdown zimbra, make lvm snapshot, start zimbra, backup the files in the snapshot, delete snapshot).

But I want to have the possibility to easily recover individual mails that have been deleted by accident and to recover whole mailboxes. To do so one possibility would be to additionally backup the boxes individually (with zmmailbox -z -m $mbox getRestURL "//?fmt=zip"). But than I would need twice as many backup space as with the above solution alone.

Perhaps it would be useful to create a second "hidden" mailbox for every user, that gets a copy of all mails, so that a mail that has been deleted in the primary mailbox can be restored if deleted. But again this would take up much more disk space than needed.

Perhaps somebody here has a good solution for me? It has to work with the zimbra open source edition.

There are several backup articles in the wiki (link at the top of this page) and more in the forums that cover a restore for email, have you looked at them?

[cyrus]

Originally Posted by phoenix

There are several backup articles in the wiki (link at the top of this page) and more in the forums that cover a restore for email, have you looked at them?

Sure, I did. I read all articles deeply.
Anyhow, I'm asking for a best practice in backing up the open source version, that enables me to do
a) disaster recovery and
b) restore individual mailboxes.
I wan't to do this without the need to do the backup twice (please re-read my first post).

[phoenix]

Originally Posted by cyrus

Sure, I did. I read all articles deeply.
Anyhow, I'm asking for a best practice in backing up the open source version, that enables me to do
a) disaster recovery and
b) restore individual mailboxes.
I wan't to do this without the need to do the backup twice (please re-read my first post).

I don't need to re-read your first post, once was enough. Did you read the posts in the forums that cover what you want to do? Which ones have you read and what's wrong with them?

[cyrus]

I read serveral posts concerning the issue "backing up and restoring individual mailboxes", and as you can see in my first post I know how to use the REST API to do this.

But I was not able to find an answer to my particular question on how to backup the mailboxes and the whole system without backing up the data twice.

If there is an answer to this particular question in the fourm (and I'm not sure there is one), you certainly can give me a hint on where to find it.