[SOLVED] Understanding the backup and restore process

[ustoun]

I still have some problem with understanding the backup and restore process..

my full mailbox database is about 90GB, last month I had every full backup status is 'completed with errors' ( I actually run short of disk space) I have only 13G free space on /opt/zimbra/backup directory, I run default backup schema which is (full on sataday, inc on sun-thu ).

My questions is HOW I am depending on my full backups ( which have status 'completed with errors' ), or if I will delete all my full backups, does it still possible to restore mailboxes from my INCREMENTAL backups ( which backup-ted successfully)

Thanks

@moderators, I am not sure if it possible to re-open the solved tread, if it's not please, give me to know

[phoenix]

You should update your forum profile with the output of the following command (do not post the output in this thread):

zmcontrol -v

I still have some problem with understanding the backup and restore process..

my full mailbox database is about 90GB, last month I had every full backup status is 'completed with errors' ( I actually run short of disk space) I have only 13G free space on /opt/zimbra/backup directory, I run default backup schema which is (full on sataday, inc on sun-thu ).

My questions is HOW I am depending on my full backups ( which have status 'completed with errors' ), or if I will delete all my full backups, does it still possible to restore mailboxes from my INCREMENTAL backups ( which backup-ted successfully)

@moderators, I am not sure if it possible to re-open the solved tread, if it's not please, give me to know

I'll move this to a new thread.

[LMStone]

I still have some problem with understanding the backup and restore process..

my full mailbox database is about 90GB, last month I had every full backup status is 'completed with errors' ( I actually run short of disk space) I have only 13G free space on /opt/zimbra/backup directory, I run default backup schema which is (full on sataday, inc on sun-thu ).

My questions is HOW I am depending on my full backups ( which have status 'completed with errors' ), or if I will delete all my full backups, does it still possible to restore mailboxes from my INCREMENTAL backups ( which backup-ted successfully)

Thanks

@moderators, I am not sure if it possible to re-open the solved tread, if it's not please, give me to know

ustoun,

I understand why you are posting here, but it would be better next time to create a new thread for a question like yours.

Incremental backups only record the incremental changes since the last Full backup. IOW, if you had no Full backups at all, you would have no restorable backups whatsoever.

Zimbra now supports doing backups to an NFS partition, and there are a lot of low-cost NAS devices which do NFS.

I'd look at the full backup detail in the Admin Console to see if the whole Full backup is bad (order a NAS today!), or if only some selected mailboxes had errors.

Hope that helps,
Mark

[ustoun]

LMStone's thanks for reply.. (@moderator thanks for moving my post to separate tread)

Ok,
1 .If I have full backups done with 'completed with errors' status, does it actually mean, that I could not restore ANYHING from my incremental backup (with status 'completed succsessful') relayed to full backup with status 'comleted with errors'
2.Another thing that I could not catch , is if I actually have, say, 16GB free space during next execution of FULL backup which is 90GB of size, why it is not just FILL all free space (16G) and failed, other than writing 6-7GB of data, after that is failing, and on the next day of incremental backup, it is successful does this backup (have status 'completed successful') , and so on ( at least, this is my case )

Thanks

[LMStone]

LMStone's thanks for reply.. (@moderator thanks for moving my post to separate tread)

Ok,
1 .If I have full backups done with 'completed with errors' status, does it actually mean, that I could not restore ANYHING from my incremental backup (with status 'completed succsessful') relayed to full backup with status 'comleted with errors'

Depends on the errors in the Full backup. If the log shows some mailboxes backed up successfully, then you can restore those mailboxes either from the Full backup or through the most recent successful Incremental backup.

If the Full backup failed with no mailboxes indicated as being successfull backed, then you have no backups -- no matter how many successful incremental backups you have.

2.Another thing that I could not catch , is if I actually have, say, 16GB free space during next execution of FULL backup which is 90GB of size, why it is not just FILL all free space (16G) and failed, other than writing 6-7GB of data, after that is failing, and on the next day of incremental backup, it is successful does this backup (have status 'completed successful') , and so on ( at least, this is my case )

Thanks

Not sure I understand the question, but you may want to search the forums for threads concerning the "--noZip" option when running zmbackup if you cannot add disk space to your Zimbra system at the moment.

Using that option restores the backup methodology to using hard links, which reduces the additional space used by each successive backup considerably.

Hard links enable you to have two or more links to the actual file, but use only the space for one copy of the file. Plus, you can delete all but one of the hard links and still have the file.

So, if you use the --noZip option (and let's say you have no backups whatsoever), the first full backup will take, say, 90GB, same as without the --noZip option.

Now, a day later you do another full backup. During that day users deleted and purged 5GB of emails and 7GB of new emails came in. The two backups together will consume ~ 92GB of space.

If you didn't have the --noZip options, your two days of backups would take ~182GB of space.

Hope that clears things up. Again, slow disks for backups are really cheap--even a 1TB USB disk costs ~$120, so I'd look at ways of expanding the storage available to Zimbra backups to help keep your data safe.

All the best,
Mark

[ustoun]

LMStone, thanks again for valuable inputs

Good thing to consider '-noZip' option..

From wiki.zimbra

Standard Backup Method

A full backup process backs up all the information needed to restore mailboxes, including the LDAP directory server, database, index directory, and message directory for each mailbox.

When backing up shared messages, the backup process looks to see whether a file representing a message already exists in the backup. If it does, it flags this object as such and does not copy its content again.

An incremental backup process backs up the LDAP data and gathers all the redo logs written since the last incremental backup.

If the incremental backup process finds no previous full backup for a mailbox, a full backup is performed on that mailbox.

Incremental backups move the redo logs to the backup directory.

The redo logs are a journal of every activity that has taken place. They contain a full copy of all messages delivered, as well as metadata such as tags, contacts, and conversations

.

These backup files can be used to restore the complete mailbox server or individual mailboxes so that account and message data is completely restored.

1.

if no previous full backup for a mailbox found during incremental backup,a full backup is performed on that mailbox

should it change the name from 'inc-[data/time] to full-[date/time]



2. if there is any activity has been wrote to redo LOGs, since last incremental successfully backup does it actually means that only deleted/received, mails/contacts will be back up through the next incremental backup
or it will be full backup method implemented for this mailbox?

Not sure I understand the question, but you may want.....

Sorry about my English

Thanks

[LMStone]

I'm glad the "--noZip" option information was helpful.

As to your last question about incrementals and no full backup, how does this sound:

Let's say the system does a full backup, then you create a new mailbox, then the next scheduled backup is an Incremental. What happens?

Since there is no existing Full backup for that new mailbox, the Incremental backup script first runs a Full backup, but ONLY of that newly created mailbox. The incremental backup script then runs the regular Incremental backup for all of the mailboxes.

So, you have two backups happening on Day 2, a very small Full backup and a system-wide Incremental backup.

BTW, you'll see that you cannot specify an incremental backup of just one mailbox; Incremental backups can only be made of the whole server.

Hope that helps,
Mark

P.S. Your English is much better than a number of my friends who were born and raised in the U.S.! No worries!

[ustoun]

LMStone thanks a lot..

I am marking this tread as SOLVED, as I have enough helpful INFO to continue explore ZIMBRA backup and more...

Thanks again