Open Source Backup strategy in 7.1.3 (with recover of deleted items)

[clmates]

Hi To all.

I have been reading wiki of FOSS backup and several forum threads regarding FOSS backup, but almost all information is not considering the new functionality of recover of deleted items.

So I want to ask expert administrators if this functionality could change the backup and restore strategy.

I'm new to zimbra and in our current email server (cyrus) all email is saved as plain files on a folder hierarchy, so we backup this email folders and are able to restore individual email folders, but our real restore issues are from users who accidentally deleted an email and they find in a few days that they don't have it. Also we had cases when we can't restore, because the user deleted the item in the same day and we didn't baked up yet.

We maintain a backup politic of full weekly backups (on friday) and daily incremental backups from monday to thursday (we don't work on weekend). Also we maintain only a Month of this backups, rotating tapes, combined with a full yearly backup.

So thinking on the backup options, seems that this could be similar to take the full + incremental backups (with lvm snapshot) in order to cover disaster recovery, and replace the restore of individual mails to the new functionality of recover deleted objects.

Do you think I'm missing some point?

Many thanks

[LaFong]

Originally Posted by clmates

Hi To all.

I have been reading wiki of FOSS backup and several forum threads regarding FOSS backup, but almost all information is not considering the new functionality of recover of deleted items.
~~~~
So thinking on the backup options, seems that this could be similar to take the full + incremental backups (with lvm snapshot) in order to cover disaster recovery, and replace the restore of individual mails to the new functionality of recover deleted objects.

Do you think I'm missing some point?

In Zimbra 7.x, there is the dumpster feature to recover recent deleted items (up to 30 days, by default). You have to enable the dumpster in the COS. After that, there is no easy method of recovering deleted items that have been removed, in the FOSS version. I have a procedure to do it, [SOLVED] Yet Another Backup Script for Community Version, but it's not exactly easy. Also, it uses rsync full+diff, but could work with lvm snapshots (I think). Both of these methods are only for mail (not calendar items, etc).

[clmates]

Hi LaFong.

Yes, I read your script in that post. At this time I'm testing with the one at the beginning of the post (not individual mailboxes), but I will look at yours also.

My question was mas in order to be sure that I do not miss something important by relying in the dumpster functionality for the "accidental user deleting some important data" but relying in a full backup (not individual) for disaster recovery



Thanks

[LaFong]

The Dumpster does what you want. In fact, it is better than your previous method because accidentally deleted items do not need to have been backed up by another method first. If you are past the 30 days, you will need to use a method like the one in my post. All FOSS servers should also use one of the backup methods on the wiki, or some other method which ensures data consistency.

[clmates]

thanks.

I will go that way then.

marked this as solved