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.

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].

 * Bug "http://bugzilla.zimbra.com/show_bug.cgi?id=7112" would address specifying a 
   different backup target as part of the zmschedulebackup utility.

 * These changes won't survive an upgrade.