Jeremy’s World

During my early days mucking around with linux in attempt to find the best pieces of software for a range of different tasks, I stumbled upon cyrus mail server, the Carnegie Mellon Unversity’s implementation of an IMAP server.

Having already tested the Washington University implementation of IMAP as well as Dovecot, I was still unconvinced by the IMAP protocol, particularly its implementation on UNIX-based systems.  Cyrus changed this point-of-view significantly.  With a closed database, capable of easily interfacing with SMTP servers such as postfix and sendmail, cyrus proved to be a robust system and with the latest versions including the possibility of scaling and distribution, it was for a long time Excel Building Management’s choice mail server.

The only problem was that the facilities for backing up a cyrus server were almost non-existent.  The only script/software I could find that even came close was mailbfr.  Unfortunately, the script was written for Mac OS servers and therefore needed some tuning and tweaking to port to a Linux flavoured system.  Thus, my programming skills came to the rescue and cyrus-backup was born.

Cyrus-backup is a simple port of an earlier version of mailbfr to the linux environment.  Although not capable of a hot backup, it is still extremely efficient at providing a full backup of an entire cyrus database including the possibility of storing users’ filtering rules.

Cyrus-backup has saved me on more than one occassion from near disaster and running it with a cron-script once a day at 2am made my life of mail server management a dream.

So now, I am providing a copy of the script, optimised for Ubuntu (but easily customisable) to all those who use cyrus servers as a solid method of providing backup.  The script is quite self-explanatory so I have not provided documentation at this stage, although if I do make changes in the future, this may be included.

You can find a copy of the script on the linux scripts download page.