20.12.3 Messaging Server Backup and Restore Utilities

To back up and restore your data, Messaging Server provides the imsbackup and imsrestore utilities. Note that the imsbackup and imsrestore utilities do not have the advanced features found in general purpose tools like Legato Networker. For example, the utilities have only very limited support for tape auto-changers, and they cannot write a single store to multiple concurrent devices. Comprehensive backup will be achieved via plug-ins to generalized tools like Legato Networker. For more information about using Legato Networker, see 20.12.6 To Use Legato Networker

20.12.3.1 The imsbackup Utility

With imsbackup, you can write selected contents of the message store to any serial device, including magnetic tape, a UNIX pipe, or a plain file. The backup or selected parts of the backup may later be recovered by using the imsrestore utility. The output of imsbackup can be piped to imsrestore.

The following example backs up the entire message store to /dev/rmt/0:

imsbackup -f /dev/rmt/0 /

This backs up the mailboxes of user ID joe to /dev/rmt/0:

imsbackup -f /dev/rmt/0 /primary/user/joe
            

This example backs up all the mailboxes of all the users defined in the backup group groupA to backupfile (see 20.12.2 To Create Backup Groups):

imsbackup -f- /primary/groupA > backupfile
            

Incremental Backup

The following example will back up messages stored from May 1, 2004 at 1:10 pm to the present. The default is to backup all the messages regardless of their dates:

imsbackup -f /dev/rmt/0 -d 20040501:131000 /
               

This command uses the default blocking factor of 20. For a complete syntax description of the imsbackup command, see the Sun Java System Messaging Server 6.3 Administration Reference.

20.12.3.2 The imsrestore Utility

To restore messages from the backup device, use the imsrestore command. For example, the following command restores messages for user1 from the file backupfile.

imsrestore -f backupfile /primary/user1

For a complete syntax description of the imsbackup command, see the Sun Java System Messaging Server 6.3 Administration Reference.