> From: Michael Loftis <[log in to unmask]>
> Reply-To: LISTSERV site administrators' forum <[log in to unmask]>
> Date: Sat, 28 Feb 2009 12:43:32 -0700
> To: <[log in to unmask]>
> Subject: Re: [LSTSRV-L] Backing up listserv database
>
> you should do it with listserv offline, and beware that you may still catch
> spool files in the act so maybe you might want to skip the spool directory.

The best way to back up a Listserv depends on business requirements.
Although I can get away with losing a day's worth of Listserv files, I could
never get away with taking the Listserv I manage (at Temple University) off
line on a daily basis for backups, even for a few minutes. Our Listserv is
active 24x7. Our Listserv lives in the eastern time zone, but we have
campuses in some other countries including Japan and China who depend on our
Listserv to post announcements, class notes, etc. Fortunately, the
~listserv/home directory isn't very large, maybe around 20GB.

We use a network-based tape backup solution for several hundred servers that
backs them up to magnetic tape. Our Listserv is among the servers that gets
backed up to tape. In fact, I run both our backup server and our Listserv,
and it would look very bad if the data protection manager's (me) data gets
lost, so I pay particularly close attention to the backups of the servers I
directly manage.

What I do to protect the data on our Listserv is backup the entire machine
(a Linux box) to tape. The backups include all the spool files, but the
spool directory usually has only a few items in it because our Listserv
tends to process them very quickly (no surprise). Backups of all our servers
are done while they are up and running.

We do not use any ODBC or any SQL stuff on our Listserv so there's no
concern about different database files needing to be backed up in a
consistent state. If there was such an issue, I would simply write a script
that dumps the database to flat files two or three times daily and allow
those dumped files to be backed up to tape using our standard data
protection methodology.

Our Listserv is at least three years behind in the version we run and on an
ancient rack mounted pc. I have a pair of new student workers setting up a
virtualized Linux machine with Listserv 15.5 now. My plan is to do some
testing of the new version and its LDAP functionality then move
~listserv/home on our production box to it along with the relevant
configuration files after our testing is done. The new VM will have the data
protected on a fairly new EMC SAN with lots of redundancy built in. Right
now, our Listserv's data sits on internal hard drives that are getting quite
old and they are not RAIDed in any way. Anyone who really needs to protect
Listserv data should store it on a disk array with at least RAID5, although
RAIDed disks still need to be backed up to other storage media.

Whatever backup method you use, be sure to test it once or twice a year.
With Listserv, you also need to understand where the relevant configuration
files are (including your mail and http server config files), where the
license file is, in addition to the actual lists and their archived
postings.