Rsync snapshots, Maildir, and Sarbanes-Oxley

[blu at vl.com (Tom Metro)]

John Abreau wrote:
> I've been making backups by hand for now, by manually copying the
> guest systems to an external usb drive periodically. But it would be
> nice to somehow be able to include them in the rsync backups.

Can you automate the startup and shutdown of the VMware guests? If so, 
then it seems a little bit of scripting wrapped around rsync should do it.


> As I understand it, Maildir stores
> message metadata in each message's filename, and that suggests
> that Maildirs could chew up a lot of space on the rsync server with
> redundant copies of the same message in slightly different filenames.

Perhaps the --fuzzy option would prove useful (quoting the man page):

   --fuzzy
      This option tells rsync that it should look for a basis file  for
      any  destination  file  that  is  missing.  The current algorithm
      looks in the same directory as the destination file for either  a
      file  that  has  an  identical size and modified-time, or a simi-
      larly-named file.  If found, rsync uses the fuzzy basis  file  to
      try to speed up the transfer.


> For Sarbanes-Oxley purposes, I need to retain all messages, so
> I can't use rsync's --delete option to remove messages from the
> backups that the user had deleted.

If you have snapshots set up correctly, you can delete files from the 
current backup, and they'll persist in the older snapshots.

  -Tom

-- 
Tom Metro
Venture Logic, Newton, MA, USA
"Enterprise solutions through open source."
Professional Profile: http://tmetro.venturelogic.com/

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