This is an old topic but I wonder if it might not make sense to revisit it. Having run MIAB for many years now, my server now has 37G of email and full backups to a Backblaze B2 bucket are taking a very long time and a couple of days ago, I noticed that I was unable to check email even at about 8:30 or 9am. A couple of thoughts on what to do moving forward.
The first would be to change the time from 3am to maybe 1am to give full backups more time to run. I’m an old man with children now so 3am seems really late to me – to be honest, even 1am seems really late to me. That’s an easy tweak and I could submit a pull request to take care of that.
The second is a little more involved but would be to have backup.py check the day of week and only run full backups if the day of week is a Saturday or a Sunday. This is under the idea that most people sleep in later on weekends and would give full backups even more time to run.
I have no simple ideas for improving the backup time, only a tip: check your user-data folder for the owncloud-backup folder. It contains old versions of owncloud, and you can delete those if you have a working owncloud installation. Over the years, these might accumulate.
I may have been seeing this issue since the 8/4/2024 Ubuntu update to Duplicity. A remote Nagios monitor started reporting IMAPS as inaccessible for ten minutes before and after the backup. In addition, rsync from my ./backup directory to a CIFS share on the network started treating all files as new every day. Hopefully, the Ubuntu update to Duplicity 3.0.2-ppa202408091359~ubuntu22.04.1 resolves the issue.
I don’t think the Duplicity 3.0.2 update is going to help you with faster backups.
My monitors indeed also sometimes trigger on the non-availability of mail services. But they’re always back up after 5 minutes (monitoring interval) and I know why.
Could you please disable my limitation for the reply? An error occurred: We’re sorry, but new users are temporarily limited to 1 reply in the same topic.
Hi! Thank you so much, Josh, for creating Mail-in-a-Box and maintaining it all these years!
It is a wonderful product and I’m a happy user for 2 years.
On the topic - I’m using MIAB as a replacement for GSuite + Dropbox and my total data size is about 0.5TB (disk size is 5TB so there is a space to grow). Full backup takes 14+ hours so I know the pain of the OP.
I second the suggestion to pick a day of the week for full backup. I personally would choose Sunday.
Other optimizations I’m trying are --volsize 500 and --asynchronous-upload.
I’ve also put the backup start to a slot, convenient to my users timezones.