Backup best practice

[Eyfi]

I've been searching the forums for a good best practice backup schedule for Zimbra.

I have not found any complete solution but bits and peaces here and there and this is what I would like to do.

1. Each day stop the Zimbra service and do a rsync of the Zimbra configuration (All except for /opt/zimbra/store and /opt/zimbra/backup) to another folder locally on the server. Then start Zimbra and move the backup folder to another server or use BackupPC to backup this folder once a day.

2. Use Zimbra backup to to a nightly backup. Full backup once a week on Saturday and incremental backups on workdays. Store backups locally on the server for 1 month.

3. Each night do a rsync backup of the /opt/zimbra/backup to another server for redundancy.

Here I'm a little bit stuck and need your suggestions:

4. I would like each month to move last full backup to offsite storage and store monthly backups for at least 6 months - 1 year there.

Pls. comment how this can be done in an effective way.

[mmorse]

A Search the forums would bring up a ColdBackup Script:
SourceForge.net ZCS Tools: Files

Also:
Editorial: TAKE TIME TO BACKUP
Full Server Backup and Restore of “open source version”
Open Source Edition Backup Procedure - ZimbraWiki

-Some have played with hotbackups-or just become an NE user...

[Eyfi]

Thanks mmorse for your reply.

After reading your links here how I see what I can do:

Mount 3 volumes to the Zimbra server

Volume 1: /opt/zimbra/backup
Volume 2: /backup/monthly
Volume 3: /backup/weekly

Then this is what I'll do:

1. Use zmschedulebackup to create this schedule:

f 0 1 * * 6
i 0 1 * * 0-5
d 1m 0 0 * * *

Now I have 1 month of daily backups on the server

2. Edit crontab and add following lines:

#keep 2 months of weekly backups
0 1 * * 7 /opt/zimbra/bin/zmbackup -f -a all -t /backup/weekly
0 1 * * * /opt/zimbra/bin/zmbackup -del 2m -t /backup/weekly

#Keep 6 months of monthly backups (first day of each month)
0 5 1 * * /opt/zimbra/bin/zmbackup -f -a all -t /backup/monthly
0 2 * * * /opt/zimbra/bin/zmbackup -del 6m -t /backup/monthly

3. Each night run a offline backup of /opt/zimbra and do rsync to /backup/zimbra.

4. Backup the 3 volumes + /backup/zimbra and /etc folders each night to our BackupPC server or do a rsync of those volumes to another server.

Now I have 1 month of daily backups 2 months of weekly backups and 6months of full backups.

If you have a simpler way of doing this I would really appreciate your comments.

Am I forgetting anything? Would you say that this covers the total backup of the system to recover from a total system crash or any day to day problems? LDAP and MySQL is included in the full and incr. backups right ?