How To Vet If Backups Are Working?

[LMStone]

We are running 4.5.3 NE on SuSE Enterprise 9.

We run a weekly full backup and incremental backups every four hours.

The full backups, from the logs, seem to take about five minutes. The incrementals, about five seconds. But, we have some 50GB of data, and while the disks are pretty darn fast (15K U320 SCSI), I'm not sure they are that fast. Our system gets 15,000-30,000 new emails a day, totaling some 2-3GB.

How can I be sure the backups are really working properly? Do I need to build a test machine and try a restore? Or is there a more efficient way?

Thanks!
Mark

[jholder]

Hmm
Yep, seems like something may be fishy.
Have you looked in the /opt/zimbra/log/mail.log file at about the time to see what it's going?

[LMStone]

Hmm
Yep, seems like something may be fishy.
Have you looked in the /opt/zimbra/log/mail.log file at about the time to see what it's going?

I have no such file. There are no backup task entries in /var/log/zimbra.log.

Where else should I be looking?

Thanks!
Mark