JDPFu.com 2025

I came across an old article that I wrote on backups that had some clock times for the different VMs. Since that article was written, I’ve changed the backup methodology from rsync to rdiff-backup.

dms44 → 1m:52s   Alfresco

crm46 → 3m:36s    vTiger

xen41 → 3m:10s    Typo

pki42 →  1m:17s

mon45 → 1m:8s

zcs43 →  3m:53s   Zimbra

Those are real “downtime” numbers to ensure completely safe backups were made with all files closed. Actually, the virutal machine is shutdown during the backup periods. Email is unavailable for 4 minutes at around 2am daily. We can live with that. Recovery works perfectly too. I’ve recovered the largest VM twice in under 20 minutes after some cockpit errors.

This works because we use Xen virtual machines and rdiff-backup. Most of the VMs are 20GB in disk size, but use less actual storage.