David Phillips wrote:
> Callum Lerwick writes:
> 
>>The real issue is reliability. A reasonable quality $600-$1000 desktop
>>is probably fine for most small business. Backup to tape or a second
>>hard drive.
> 
> 
> This is bad advice for an email server.  With most mail severs, you cannot
> reliably backup the queue or the mailstore, since the state is constantly
> changing.  The only freely available mail server that has built in
> clustering is PowerMail (dbmail allows for clustering via the database).
> The best way to backup a mail server is to use RAID.  Any backup you have
> will be way too old.
> 

Oh no, I really disagree here.  We back up our IMAP mail store every 
night (Cyrus, weekly full, nightly incremental).  About once a month one 
of our administrative types here does something like deleting all their 
mail folders.  One of the few times anyone is grateful to me is when I 
pull them out from that.  This works reasonably well with Cyrus, and 
much better if you can snapshot the file systems. This depends very much 
on your mail server's storage model, though.  Reload the folders, do a 
reconstruct on their mailbox, and there you go - happy professor.  Happy 
professor is really important to us.


> If users are storing mail on the server, as with IMAP, then it could be
> prudent to backup the mailstore, but only as an emergency measure against
> RAID failure.
> 


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