On Tue, 2006-01-03 at 02:35, Hans Kristian Rosbach wrote: > > > > There's always backup/mkfs/restore. If you aren't prepared > > to restore you should probably take care of that before > > worrying about efficiency. > > Do you know how long time it would take to put back 800GB of > mailboxes on our mailserver from the tape backup? > No customers in the world would allow us to actually take > such a time-off from serving their mail. How do you plan to deal with an operator or software error that erases your current files? > Granted we COULD set up another box with a 1TB raid5 array > to hold the data temporarily, but it would still take time > since we would still have to shut down mail services before > taking a copy. It would still be a bad workaround for a > real problem. (Yes I know that ~99% of us don't ever need it) You can do a swap like this with very little downtime if you do an rsync while the system is live to get most of the data copied, the repeat the rsync with the --delete option to catch any subsequent changes with the system offline, then swap mountpoints. > Thus we would need an on-line defragmenter that we could > set up for a low-prio night run once or twice a year. If you use maildir or other 1-message-per-file format, a defragmenter isn't going to help much because it won't know to move the directory contents together. If you have standard mbox format you just have to re-write them periodically which will happen anyway if the users ever delete anything. -- Les Mikesell lesmikesell@xxxxxxxxx
