Incremental backup

trickert

Hi,

I know about the helper_script/backup_and_restore.sh. But I’ve a 500GB mailcow environment and producing every day a 500GB backup isn’t a good solution.

So, my mailcow vmail is stored on a folder on the system itself. When I have a deeper look into backup_and_restore it only makes a tar of that volume within docker. So I could just use for example borgbackup to make incremental backups of that folder.

Is this a recommended solution or is there another approach?

With best regards
Thoralf

MAGIC

Hello,

Yes you can use any software to backup the volumes and the mailcow folder

diekuh

That’s correct. Just rsync the vmail folder for example. Rsnapshot etc. is also useful for this.

strarsis

Any nice off-site, affordable cloud backup services?
One could argue, that a simple rsync + ZFS or other versioning file system would replace an incremental rsync backup?
But those cloud services would cost much more, right?
In the end I not only want to backup things, I also want to be able to restore mail in the case a customer accidentally deleted an email (most use IMAP). On the other hand, the backup-interval may be too long for restoring mails that have been received and (accidentally) removed on the same day.

gabriel_gomes

strarsis for cloud backup I recommend backblaze, it’s super cheap and has a great infrastructure .

trickert

I make now backup via the integrated backup script for all except vmail and make a rsync on the generated tars and the vmail volume.

D4niel

Could you guys give me a hint on how exactly you’re backing up vmail in this scenario?

Are you backing up the volume in /var/lib/… or are you mounting the volume locally in docker-compose? I’m not sure what’s best practice here.

Matthis

You may have a look at this thread: https://community.mailcow.email/d/426-incremental-backup-with-borg