Yeah, but after you back up the machine, it may not crash for several hours
(or days), and most, if not all, of these messages will be out of the queue
by then.  If you restore from backup, you'll get double deliveries, and
you're still going to lose everything that was in the incoming and active
queues at the time of the crash anyway.

If you need to back up any part of the queue, it would most likely be the
deferred queue.  Make sure if you ever do restore your queue from backup
that you do a "postsuper -s" before starting postfix.  This will rename all
of the queue files corresponding to their new inodes, and fix any potential
problems.

(note: when I say crash I mean something happens to the machine where you
need to do a full restore from tape)

Are you running linux for the mailserver?  How many messages get pumped
through it each day?

Jay  

> -----Original Message-----
> From: Bob Tanner [mailto:tanner at real-time.com] 
> Sent: Friday, December 07, 2001 3:46 AM
> To: tclug-list at mn-linux.org
> Subject: Re: [TCLUG] Backing up a very busy server?
> 
> 
> Quoting Yaron (jethro at freakzilla.com):
> >   Hey,
> > 
> > On Thu, 6 Dec 2001, Bob Tanner wrote:
> > 
> > > Mail server is getting very busy. Any recommendations on how to 
> > > prevent errors like this?
> > 
> > Tell your backup program not to backup /var/spool/mqueue? 
> Data in that 
> > dir isn't supposed to be static anyway.
> 
> Ooohhh....
> 
> % mailq | wc
>     680    3111   38830
> 
> 680 "transient" message. I think users would be pretty upset 
> if I lost almost 700 messages.
> 
> -- 
> Minneapolis St. Paul Twin Cities MN        | Phone : (952)943-8700
> http://www.mn-linux.org Minnesota Linux    | Fax   : (952)943-8500
> Key fingerprint =  6C E9 51 4F D5 3E 4C 66 62 A9 10 E5 35 85 39 D9 
> 
> _______________________________________________
> Twin Cities Linux Users Group Mailing List - Minneapolis/St. 
> Paul, Minnesota http://www.mn-linux.org 
> tclug-list at mn-linux.org 
> https://mailman.mn-> linux.org/mailman/listinfo/tclug-list
>