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.