I've not been able to find the answer to this in the docs or mailing list... I'd like to use the snapshot feature of the linux volume manager to take block level snaps of the cyrus databases and mailstore at regular intervals. To ensure consistency of the databases I assume you need to shut down cyrus... but I was looking for a way to do this without disconnecting imap and pop clients... a way to suspend operations.. flush the databases and sync the disks before taking a snap.
Cyrus has no facilities for doing this. We do backups using the Veritas vxfs snapshot feature.
The databases can all be backed up live; at least one of the two copies in db.backup[12] is guaranteed to be sane, so if on a catastrophic failure the databases are corrupted, you can try one or the other.
Larry
