Is there a way to not be down during manual backup

1

Launching a backup with

$ sudo management/backup.py

apparently stops all the services? Webmail, IMAP etc.
This behaviour would only make sense if I’m migrating a box. I’m not!
What if I’m just testing my backups? Is there maybe a command line argument that tells Mailinabox to do a backup without stopping everything?

2

So, I checked backup.py which is very easy to follow thanks to helpful comments (well done to the devs). I see that those services are stopped only during a full (non-incremental) backup. So not every time. I guess there might be a reason why those are stopped, maybe something about data integrity, and avoiding any changes to the data halfway during a backup. Just a guess. Still, I wonder if there could be a way to avoid being down during the whole data transfer (90 minutes in my case, using S3 backup).

3

One way that is supported by mailinabox is to perform the backup separately from copying files to remote storage:

  • Set backup to be performed to a local folder
  • Create a file /home/user-data/backup/after-backup. Use this file to setup a syncrhonization between your local and remote backups. The file will be executed after the services have been restarted, so the box will be online while remote syncing is performed.
1 Like
4

Thank you @KiekerJan this is an interesting feature I might try it in the future