Backup sizes

[Ron Haines]

I have only two active users, one with about 4GB of message data, the other with about 700MB. The full backup just over a week ago took over 4GB of disk space, but the most recent full backup occupies only 200MB. I have verified that the message store occupies about 4.8GB. I noticed this because I am doing a weekly archive of opt/zimbra/backup to tape and the most recent backup only copied about 200MB of data. Is there something wrong with backup?

This is 4.5.5 running under OS X 10.4.9.

thanks for any advice,
Ron.

[Ron Haines]

To answer my own post - zmbackup creates hard links to files already in the backup directory. Facile use of 'du' on the whole sessions directory gives the impression that all full backups after the first are too small because du does not count files twice in a single execution. However running 'du' on each individual session shows all the files are present. The crucial sentence from 'man du' is:

"Files having multiple hard links are counted (and displayed) a single time per du execution."

Thanks to the Zimbra support folks for patiently leading me to this realization.

[LMStone]

To answer my own post - zmbackup creates hard links to files already in the backup directory. Facile use of 'du' on the whole sessions directory gives the impression that all full backups after the first are too small because du does not count files twice in a single execution. However running 'du' on each individual session shows all the files are present. The crucial sentence from 'man du' is:

"Files having multiple hard links are counted (and displayed) a single time per du execution."

Thanks to the Zimbra support folks for patiently leading me to this realization.

Hi Ron,

Welcome to the forums!

I read your post with sympathy!

When I first started using Zimbra one of our clients called asking to have a mailbox restored. I noticed from the logs that the most recent 50GB Full Backup (we run NE) had taken about two minutes.

Like you, Support was very understanding (and calming!) and of course once I heard the words "hard links" my systolic blood pressure dropped about 50 points back to normal.

Enjoy!
Mark