NE - moving backup partition - options?

su_A_ve · Post by **su_A_ve** » Mon Jan 21, 2013 4:09 pm

We currently have about 10K accounts using 900GB in /opt/zimbra/backup. We need to migrate this to a new storage. We are using hard links as in previous versions. Transferring via rsync is taking several days and rsync doesn't seem to like when new nightly backups run. So one option would be to disable backups until everything gets copied.
Another option I thought about would be to mount the new storage under /opt/zimbra/backup and the old storage under another directory. But would I be able to switch between the two directories if I need to restore from an older backup set?
TIA.

jerryboi · Post by **jerryboi** » Tue Jan 22, 2013 5:12 am

[quote user="su_A_ve"]would I be able to switch between the two directories if I need to restore from an older backup set?[/QUOTE]
Affirmative. I have done that before. It is safe to mount the backups to another folder and in case you need to restore an account you can just set that folder in 'path to the backup target' and click 'Find backups' on Admin/Backups.

bdial · Post by **bdial** » Tue Jan 22, 2013 8:18 am

I have big slow storage mounted to /opt/zimbra/backup/archive. Then I have disabled deletes, and setup a crontab to move backups older than 30 days to the archive folder

0 0 * * * find /opt/zimbra/backup/sessions/ -maxdepth 1 -mtime +31 -exec mv {} /

opt/zimbra/backup/archive/ ; >/dev/null 2>&1

then if need be i can have quick access to those backups for restores older than 30 days

su_A_ve · Post by **su_A_ve** » Thu Feb 07, 2013 12:09 pm

[quote user="jerryboi"]Affirmative. I have done that before. It is safe to mount the backups to another folder and in case you need to restore an account you can just set that folder in 'path to the backup target' and click 'Find backups' on Admin/Backups.[/QUOTE]
So, I tested this on our dev environment. Here are the steps:
* Renamed /opt/zimbra/backup to /opt/zimbra/oldbackup

* Created a new directory called /opt/zimbra/backup with the same permissions as above

* Ran a full backup

* Changed the 'Find Backups' location and it properly identified the old backups

* Attempted to restore an account from /opt/zimbra/oldbackup and got the following error:
Backup target is invalid. Please check the path to the backup target. Message: Invalid backup target: Backup target /opt/zimbra/oldbackup does not exist Error code: backup.INVALID_BACKUP_TARGET Method: [unknown] Details:soap:Sender
I submitted a ticket - but any ideas?