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On Tuesday, 23.08.2005 at 11:01 +0200, Paul Bijnens wrote:

> >3. Copy in a robust fashion from the mail spools to a temporary
> >location prior to the backup job, so that these copies of the spools
> >will not change; then backup the copies rather than the 'live'
> >spools.  The "robust fashion" would work in a similar way to how
> >locking mail spools operates when appending/deleting messages.
> 
> I use filesystem snapshots.  Taking a snapshot is only matter of
> seconds.  I make a snapshot a few minutes before the amanda backup
> starts.  Amanda then makes a backup of that snapshot instead
> 
> Your OS has to support is however.  Solaris >2.8 (2.8 plain needs
> patches) can do it.  Linux with lvm1 can do it too; Linux with lvm2 is
> not yet stable enough for doing snapshots.  (I have lvm2 snapshots
> working on one system without problems, but on other systems it makes
> the computer crash;  maybe related to amount of memory and/or system
> load: the system where it does work has lots of RAM, and is very quiet
> in the night.)
> 
> Mail me for the scripts to create a snapshot if you're interested.

The server in question is a fairly generic Debian/Sarge mail server,
RAID setup for disks, 2.6 kernel.  And /var/mail is on its own ext3
partition.

You mention that it works with LVM.  Do snapshots *require* LVM?

Dave.
- -- 
Dave Ewart
davee AT ceu.ox.ac DOT uk
Computing Manager, Cancer Epidemiology Unit
Cancer Research UK / Oxford University
PGP: CC70 1883 BD92 E665 B840 118B 6E94 2CFD 694D E370
N 51.7518, W 1.2016
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