Zimbra backup strategy

[CadilLACi]

Hi!

I am curious about Your experience with backing up Zimbra.

I do weekly snapshot backups of our Zimbra server, but never needed to restore until today. I rsync those one day later to offsite.

A colleague of mine ran into some trouble when a hardware error rendered his backup hdd useless and his zimbra installation faulted on LDAP inconsistency error, so I just want to make sure that my onsite-offsite backup strategy is sound.

So, what is your experience with restoring Zimbra?
Is snapshot backup enough?
Should I do a stop backup?
Or is it necessary to make a backup inside Zimbra?

Did anyone already restore any zimbra from proxmox backup? What is your experience with it?

thx

Laszlo

 

[LnxBil]

A colleague of mine ran into some trouble when a hardware error rendered his backup hdd useless and his zimbra installation faulted on LDAP inconsistency error, so I just want to make sure that my onsite-offsite backup strategy is sound.

If you have better backups than your collegue, I guess you're fine. For a production setup, you need raided backups and additional off-site backups of your backups, so that a single hardware failure cannot render your backups useless. According to GDPR, this is required in the EU, so if you're EU-based, get a decent backup strategy.

Or is it necessary to make a backup inside Zimbra?

Zimbra does include a backup mechanism, have you tried that?

Is snapshot backup enough?

We run Zimbra directly on ZFS (the guest OS provides ZFS) and use that also for replication in addition to the Zimbra internal backup. With this, we have zimbra-internal backup for restore in zimbra and have everything also replicated to multiple sites. ZFS snapshots are done every 15 minutes, so that we have a very fine control of the machine.

We created a test environment on basis of these zfs snapshots which worked fine, but fortunately haven't run into any problems of Zimbra itself so that we needed to restore from backup. We seldomly have to restore some items from the zimbra internal backup - mostly for test purposes.

 

[CadilLACi]

Thx, LnxBil!

The problem is, the guy is running Zimbra OSE (Open Source Edition). To get live backup capabilities, he would have to upgrade it to Zimbra Suite Plus at least.

That is why he asked me - i recommendend him proxmox to begin with - whether the proxmox built in snapshot (that is happening live) is enough or not.

I had restored Mysql servers from proxmox snapshot backups too, without any problems, but zimbra is kinda fickle. From my experience, it is much more affected by any interruptions then any other software I use. For example xfs file system ruins it - it is very sensitive to any file system errors - interruptions.

That is why I am asking about proxmox built-in backup.

 

[czechsys]

Never rely on the proxmox built-in backup for applications (only when file based). Anything with db needs its own application backup.

 

[tom]

You can do backup in stop mode. This means, the VM is shutting down, start the backup process and starts again immediatly. so you have a short downtime (just the reboot time - a minute or a bit more), but the backup data is clean.

 

[CadilLACi]

You can do backup in stop mode. This means, the VM is shutting down, start the backup process and starts again immediatly. so you have a short downtime (just the reboot time - a minute or a bit more), but the backup data is clean.

Thx! I' ll tell the guy to do that!

 

[iMx]

I use Zextras for mine - yes, it is a paid for license, but very reasonably priced. Also gives migration tools, backup, and push email.