natalie wrote:
How should I backup my users mail in ubuntu? I have a ubuntu server with about 15 users. The combined mail size is 20gb. What would be the best way of backing this up daily? Who about recovering it?
For backing up mail, remember there are two important moving parts - Inboxes (usually /var/spool/mail/username or just /var/mail/username) and folders (/home/username/mail/ (in olden days this was /home/usernam/Mail)). Make sure to back 'em both up.
I use rsync from a well-secured box (many howtos online) for my backups. I recently lost my personal mail server and was able to restore everything from backups and freezing the dead hard drive. I had an added difficulty in that I had to transfer the old stuff from mbox format to mailder format for the new server. I had one 3:00a.m. cockup where I did an rsync --delete and wasted y new Inbox (luckily with very few messages in it yet). The lessons here are a) you should ALWAYS run rsync with the -n flag the first time you add --delete b) it's much easier to do restores on a non-running system (i.e. stop the mail server daemon so you're not hitting a moving target) c) you can never back up TOO much, and d) don't hack at 3:00 a.m. if you can help it.
Good luck . I've been running linux mail servers since 1996 or so.
