Problem

A Forum reader recently asked:

"Q1. If I run DBcopy, do I have all the files I need - with the exception of GroupWise NLMS - to recover for DR?

Q2. If I let DBCopy run for a week to add to the target directory, and I perform a mailbox restore, will it restore correctly?

Q3. Could this be used as the GroupWise Restore Area?"

And here are the responses from Adam Gabriel and Danita Zanre ...

Solution

Adam Gabriel

A1: Yes, except for config files(which would point to mail volume or directory).

A2: Each night the dbcopy is going to backup the state of the mailbox, overwriting the previous "state". It doesn't aggregate. It will restore the entire mailbox to the last state the dbcopy was run at, but you won't be able to do individual message restores on anything older than
your last dbcopy.

A3. I do, I have plenty of space now on mailserver, so I do a dbcopy cron'd nightly and back that up. I also cron a weekend dbcopy and use that as my restore area. Users can restore any messages that they deleted that week. If you are short on space, you can use your SAN in NetWare, or any mounted filesytem in Linux (NFS, SAN, etc.)

Danita Zanre

One thing you can do is create different directories for the DBCopy for each night, and just "symlink" the OFFILES - so OFFILES (which is the bulk of the email) isn't recreated every night (just added to). This way you have 7
directories of ofuser/ofmsg directories, and thus 7 restore points, etc.

This is very easy to do if you are using Linux to DBCOPY - I'm not sure if NetWare can do this so easily.