I had the problem of backing up (daily) a group of 50 users' mailboxes and taking the server down by doing a cold backup is not really an option. I am using the community version. I am not a Linux guru by any means, however was able to fashion the following scripts that function just fine for my needs, and perhaps can help someone else looking for a similar functionality. I am also up for any "professionalization" that can be done by the real Linux guys seemingly abundant in the Zimbra cosmos.
I am using several steps here. First, a script to export a single user account using zmmailbox. This is used by the next script.
Code:
#!/bin/bash
# baccount.sh -- Script to export select Zimbra accounts
USERNAME=$1
TODAY=`date`
LOGFILE="/backup/log/backuplog.txt"
echo $TODAY >> $LOGFILE
echo $USERNAME >> $LOGFILE
/opt/zimbra/bin/zmmailbox -z -m $USERNAME gms >> $LOGFILE
/opt/zimbra/bin/zmmailbox -z -m $USERNAME getRestURL "//?fmt=tgz" > /backup/accounts/$USERNAME.tgz
echo --------------------- >> $LOGFILE
The above is called using ./baccount.sh
username@zimbradomain.com and outputs a file
username@zimbradomain.com.tgz to the directory specified.
The script to put this together is as follows.
Code:
#!/bin/bash
# get a list of all the accounts and create a script to
# execute the baccount.sh script with the email address
# of the user as a command line variable
#use zmaccts and extract only the email address from the result
#then concatenate the "/backup/./baccount.sh <emailaddress>" string for each account and write it to the file
/opt/zimbra/bin/./zmaccts | grep "@" | awk '{print "/backup/./baccount.sh " $1}' > /backup/accountbackup.sh
# change permissions on the newly created script
chmod 755 /backup/accountbackup.sh
# Execute the newly created script - this creates a tgz file for each account
/backup/./accountbackup.sh
# this mounts an SMB drive of a neighboring win machine and copies the backups over - could be anything
mount -t smbfs -o username=username,password=password //windowsMachineName/windowsShare /data
cp /backup/accounts/*.tgz /data The above script queries Zimbra for a list of users and generates a shell script called /backup/accountbackup.sh,
changes permissions on the newly created shell script and executes it, calling the baccount.sh script for each email address in the system and subsequently generating a complete mailbox export for each account.
In my example, it then mounts a remote smb volume and copies the backups off-server.
To restore one of these accounts, I use the command:
Code:
/opt/zimbra/bin/zmmailbox -z -m UserEmailAddress postRestURL "//?fmt=tgz&resolve=reset" /backup/accounts/UserEmailAddress.tgz
I am sure this can all be made more generic and probably simplified, but I have found the flexibility of having these individual mailbox backups to be very very handy when coupled with a weekly full system backup. This procedure is run nightly.
The restore functions best when restored to an empty, newly created account.
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Hot backup question on open source? 
Scary things is something i genreally wan't to avoid, but it would be nice to now in mor detail what these scary things are.
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