Backing up Zimbra

With a Mail system you have a moving target.  You can do one or variations of the following.

quick: Make a system Snapshot (don't keep too many) with VMWare or Acronis etc. (this is not a diff method, but there are likely other ways to get that0.

You can run Mirrored hard Drives of your storage, then pause your mirror and backup the mirror while the master/postoffice is still runnning... then resync your mirror to the master after the backup..

You can also just turn off your active services, and backup, then reactivate them.  I try to do this when I am even taking a backup of a Web Server.

Good luck...  Mail Servers are a lot of work and we went with a hosted Zimbra to make some time available.  They purport to have good backups.  Also the hosted version was the "enterprise" with Active Sync (does that really matter, i don't know, but I like to keep messages living really on the server).  Can you get more than IMAP out of the TKL version of Zimbra?  Is IMAP sufficient?  I digress...

I did consider using it for the small non-profit I work for, but we ended up going with Google Apps free version. It acheives our ends and you can't beat the price! Obviously that's not going to work for everyone though.

As for Zimbra backups, I don't see any reason why you couldn't still install and use Duplicity (the backend for TKLBAM). Although it will take a little configuring I'm sure. I imagine part of the process would be to have a hook script to dump your database prior to backup. Ultimately it would acheive the same ends as TKLBAM although not quite as neatly and automagically and would require a bit of work setting up and testing until you have something you are happy with and works as expected. The plus side of that though is that if you got it all working sweet, you could share this info with the TKL core devs and that may assist pushing forward TKLBAM support for the Zimbra appliance.

Another possibility would be to install Zimbra over an LVM. Seeing as the TKL Zimbra appliance is a legacy one (ie based on Ubuntu 8.04/Hardy) it doesn't support LVM OOTB AFAIK and I'm not sure how you'd go getting it to install like that (I imagine it would be possible but not sure how - google may have some ideas though). Once running on LVM though, you can relatively easily (or so I've read) take snapshots of a running filesystem from within your appliance (no need for 3rd party tools such as Acronis).

So when you are logged into the hub and selecting your appliance, look for the link towards the top right which says something like 'legacy appliances' (or similar) - you should find it in there.