Changing Backup directory and General Information

Revision as of 04:46, 26 August 2007 by Mmorse (talk | contribs)

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

Changing the backup directory

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

New method: As of 4.5.6 the backup tab in the admin console (they can also be set with zmprov) allows for setting:

zimbraBackupTarget

zimbraBackupReportEmailSubjectPrefix

zimbraBackupReportEmailSender

zimbraBackupReportEmailRecipients

These we're added in RFE: Bug 12442 - Backup/restore: add support for notification

Old method:

 * 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.
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