Re: Best practice to backup & restore cyrus imap data

On Thursday, 11 April 2024 17:36:13 CEST denis via Info wrote:
> I am planning to migrate our production cyrus-imap server to
> a new server with the latest OS and cyrus-imap version. I noticed that the
> latest version of cyrus is storing the emails on the filesystem differently
> from the legacy ones. It is using uuid storage.

Actually, when talking about backups, the storage has not changed.

> What are the good practice to :-
> 
> Nightly backup:
> 
> ON LEGACY CYRUS we do
> 
> 1.       Stop cyrus
> 2.       Snapshot data volume and mount it
> 3.       Restart cyrus
> 4.       Take data backup on an external media
> 5.       Backup configuration files
> 
> Is this procedure safe to implement it on the latest cyrus
> version?    

Yes, I use the same steps for my environment. (nearly, as I don't bother 
stopping Cyrus)

> Moving user from one cyrus-imap server to another cyrus-imap
> server with the same cyrus version:
> 
> 
>  ON LEGACY CYRUS we do:
> 
> 1.       Ask user not to use email
> 2.       Redirect user's emails to another temporarily mailbox
> 3.       On the source server I copy the corresponding email
> directory and sub directories. Very easy to identify them
> 4.       On the destination server I create single mailbox
> with the email name.
> 5.       I identify the filesystem directory associated
> the mailbox just created and restore the data backed up in step 3
> 6.       Reconstruct the mailbox.
> 
> This procedure definitely is at least not practical to
> implement on the newest version of cyrus. Any suggestion how to transfer a
> user to a different server?

Are you talking about using this to migrate users to the new cyrus version?

I upgraded to the latest version without migrating to a different server. I 
just made sure I have working backups, shut down the cyrus server and went 
through the upgrade steps as described.

NOTE: I did test the upgrade steps several times on a VM where I restored the 
backups to (good test of the backups and restore-method btw :) )

> Granularly restore a single email from backup:
> 
> ON LEGACY CYRUS we do:
> 
> 1.       Ask user to create a new folder in the email
> 2.       Ask the user not to use the email
> 3.       Restore the email file from the backup to the
> corresponding folder on the file system
> 4.       Reconstruct the mailbox

This will still work on the current version.

--
Joost



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