20.12.9 Message Store Disaster Backup and Recovery

A disaster refers to a catastrophic failure of the entire message store as opposed to a mailbox or set of mailboxes. That is, a situation where all data on the message store servers are lost. A complete message store disaster restore will consist of restoring the following lost data:

• All message store data. These can be backed up using the procedures described in 20.12 Backing Up and Restoring the Message Store. If file system backup method is used, be sure to backup the following data:

  • All message store partitions

  • The message store database files at msg-svr-base/data/store/mboxlist.

  • The message store database snapshots at msg-svr-base/data/store/dbdata/snapshots (Note that the location of message store database snapshot files can be configured with the configutil parameter local.store.snapshotpath.)

• Configuration data. Including the local configuration file at msg-svr-base/data/config

If you want to backup your Message Store for disaster recovery, you can use a file system snapshot tools to take a snapshot of the file system. The snapshot must be a point-in-time file system snapshot. Otherwise, the mboxlist backup cannot be used (the mboxlist database must restored from a complete database snapshot).

It is best to capture all the data (message store partitions, database files and so on) at the same point-in-time, however, if this cannot be done, then you must backup the data in this order:

1. Database snapshots

2. Database files

3. Message store partitions

4. Configuration data

If the message store partitions and the database files are not backed up with the same point-in-time snapshot, run reconstruct -m after restoring the file system snapshots. This will synchronize the database and the store partitions.