Backup

What do you need to back up on your qmail server.

Qmail Control Files

Back up these files:

/var/qmail/control
/var/qmail/user
/var/qmail/alias

Vpopmail

Vpopmail sites should back up the vpopmail mail directories

/home/vpopmail/domains

SquirrelMail

Squirrelmail stores user data like address books under the "data" directory. These directories should be backed up.

Rsync

rsync is a handy tool to do incremental backups across a network to a secondary machine. With the right configurations the secondary machine could automatically take over control of the mail server ( high availablity, hot failover, hot standby ).

Note: rsync does not automatically copy symbolic links which will cause all your ezmlm mailing lists to fail since they use symbolic links to .qmail-listname files.

Here are some sample rsync lines

# qmail control files
rsync -aW --size-only --delete mail.inter7.com::qcontrol /var/qmail/control
rsync -aW --size-only --delete mail.inter7.com::qusers /var/qmail/users
rsync -aW --size-only --delete mail.inter7.com::qalias /var/qmail/alias

# vpopmail mail directories
rsync -aW --size-only --delete mail.inter7.com::vpopmail /home/vpopmail/domains

# squirrelmail address books
rsync -aQ --size-only --delete mail.inter7.com::squirreldata /var/www/html/webmail/data