halfgaar wrote:
I've been Googling for backup strategies/scripts, and I find it all very rudimentary, and when it comes to disaster recovery, mostly inferior to my virtual machine snapshots.
Can I ask you about this... because I've been struggling with clean backups for Zimbra.
My Zimbra server is running in VirtualBox. I looked at snapshots, but saw a few comments that
snapshots were not a suitable long term backup mechanism.
In the end, I went with an "outside the VM" system: clean shutdown, copy the VM folder, restart.
My script then takes the copy and zips/encrypts it before moving it to a long term storage + rotating.
The server is down for a few minutes (SSDs FTW!) in the early hours - which has been fine.
I've had a few problems that zimbra does not always come back cleanly on reboot - several
times LDAP has not come up quickly and other services will fail, or a patch has come through
and mess up some file permissions (TWICE now).
I'm interested in your script around snapshots because it would reduce the reboots (and potential
startup problems).
- how/when do you clean the snapshots created? Do you do that automatically? How long do you let the chain get?
- how often do you backup/snapshot?
- are you on VMWare, VBox, HyperV?
- do you have a script you can share?
I'm happy to share my script if its of any use.
Thanks!
Paul.