Zimbra Forums

I read the Zimbra Appliance Backup Whitepaper and it clearly advocates VMware's Data Recovery appliance. I would like to know if this should be supplemented by Zimbra's own backup feature. In the license it says:

However, I've read that backup via the CLI works. Couldn't this have been added to the admin console?
Thanks

Snapshot backups are faster and easier, which is why we're recommending them for the appliance admins.

[quote user="marcmac"]Snapshot backups are faster and easier, which is why we're recommending them for the appliance admins.[/QUOTE]
Hi marcmac,
When you say snapshot backups you are referring to VMware's DR appliance, correct?
Has file level restore been tested with Zimbra or is a complete snapshot restore the preferred alternative? For instance, say a mailbox has been deleted by accident. If a complete DR snapshot is restored then all the other mailboxes may be affected in that mail is lost.

I would like clarification on that as well. If I can't do an individual mailbox restore, then I will seriously rethink the appliance route.

Thanks

[quote user="marcmac"]Snapshot backups are faster and easier, which is why we're recommending them for the appliance admins.[/QUOTE]
For disaster recovery, that is most certainly the way to go. However, backups are not just for disaster recovery. Their purpose is to prevent all kinds of data loss, be it a server failure, or a mistakenly clicked Delete button.
In systems like e-mail, where a user can easily lose a record by mistake, the administrator must always be able to retreive individual records from backup, unless the user can do that themselves. Therefore, an e-mail system where the only possibility to retreive records is to do a full disaster recovery, is not viable in most (if any) enterprises.
If you can use the snapshot backups for granular recovery (which, I guess, might even be possible), you should provide instructions for doing that in the Admin Guide, as this process is a daily routine for any administrator running a large scale e-mail/groupware installation.
- J
EDIT: Out of intrest, I checked the Wikipedia definition for Backup here, and it points out the same facts pretty well. Let me quote: "Backups are useful primarily for two purposes. The first is to restore a state following a disaster (called disaster recovery). The second is to restore small numbers of files after they have been accidentally deleted or corrupted."

Also, as the description of snapshot method as a backup method points out: "While a snapshot is very handy for viewing a filesystem as it was at a different point in time, it is hardly an effective backup mechanism by itself."