Sun Java System Messaging Server 6 2005Q4 Administration Guide

To Create Backup Groups

A backup group is an arbitrary set of user mailboxes defined by regular expressions. By organizing user mailboxes into backup groups, you can define more flexible backup management.

For example, you could create three backup groups, the first containing user IDs starting with the letters A through L, the second with users whose user IDs begin with M-Z, and the third with users whose user IDs begin with a number. Administrators could use these backup groups to backup mailboxes in parallel, or perhaps only certain groups on one day and other groups on another.

There are several things to remember about backup groups:

  1. These are arbitrary virtual groups of mail users. They do not precisely map to the message store directory (Figure 18–1), although it may look like it.

  2. They are defined by the administrator using UNIX regular expressions.

  3. The regular expressions are defined in the configuration filemsg_svr_base/config/backup-groups.conf

  4. When backup groups are referenced in imsbackup and imsrestore, they use the path format: /partition_name/backup_group

The format of backup-groups.conf is as follows:


group_name=definition
group_name=definition
.
.
.

Using the example described in the paragraph above, the following definitions would be used to create the three backup groups:


groupA=[a-l].*
groupB=[m,-z].*
groupC=[0-9].*

You can now scope imsbackup and imsrestore at several levels. You can backup/restore the whole message store using the backup command:

imsbackup -f device /

To backup all mailboxes for all users in groupA use the following:

imsbackup -f device /partition/groupA

The default partition is called primary.

Pre-defined Backup Group

Messaging Server includes one predefined backup group that is available without creating the backup-groups configuration file. This group is called user; it includes all users. For example, the following will backup all users on the primary partition:

imsbackup -f backupfile /primary/user