Changing Backup directory and General Information
Default Backup Information
Backing up the Zimbra server on a regular basis can help you quickly restore your mail service, if an unexpected crash occurs. The backup process writes a consistent snapshot of mailboxes to a designated backup directory.
* Zimbra mailboxes can be restored from the following:
* Full backup files that contains all the information needed to restore mailboxes
* Incremental backup files that contains the LDAP directory server files and all the redo log transactions written since the last backup
* Redo logs that contains current and archived transactions processed by the Zimbra server since the last incremental backup
* crontab -l -- Default Crontab of Zimbra user.
0 1 * * 6 /opt/zimbra/bin/zmbackup -f -a all
0 1 * * 0-5 /opt/zimbra/bin/zmbackup -i -a all
0 0 * * * /opt/zimbra/bin/zmbackup -del 1m
* Default Backup Directory: /opt/zimbra/backup
Why To Change the Path
* To move the backups to a safer place [SAN, Netapp Appliance] * Storage issues, lesser space on the local disk for large deployments. * Take Backups of Multi-Install Zimbra Server to a single place/server on different directories. * You can use NFS also to store the backup on a different location.
How to Change
* You can edit the backup cronjob and specify a different backup location using the -t switch.
Steps
* su - zimbra
* crontab -e
* 0 1 * * 6 /opt/zimbra/bin/zmbackup -f -a all -t </path/to/new target>
* 0 1 * * 0-5 /opt/zimbra/bin/zmbackup -i -a all -t </path/to/new target>
* 0 0 * * * /opt/zimbra/bin/zmbackup -del 1m
* Save the file [Esc :wq]. * You can also use Symlinks to define new Backup Paths.
* These changes won't survive an upgrade.
Notes
* If you want to take backups of Multi-Server install of Zimbra (Ldap (Zimbra-1), Mailstore (Zimbra-2), Logger (Zimbra-3)) to a Single backup server the backup directories should be different for each server.
* Eg:- On the backup server something like:- /path/backup/zimbra-1/, /path/backup/zimbra-2/, and /path/backup/zimbra-3/.
* The -t option should be specified for zmbackup -del also.
* Bug "http://bugzilla.zimbra.com/show_bug.cgi?id=7112" would address specifying a different backup target as part of the zmschedulebackup utility.