Hi all,

I'd like to backup the /Mercury/*.* files regularly (WinXP, batch file) and therefore stop/terminate the mail server and the loader.exe. Is there a switch for the loader.exe to stop/terminate the process intentionly?

Regards 

KHK

why not use Mercury as a service and run "net pause mercury" in your batch file?

I run Mercury as a service using NT Wrapper under XP, and back up the folders in \mercury\mail daily using a batch file. I haven't ever stopped Mercury to do that and I haven't had a problem in the nearly 5 years I've been doing it - but perhaps I've been lucky. However, I only back up the \mail folders and I do it when there are no users logged in.

 Chris

+1

I do nightly backups of the Mercury folder (all files) while it is running.

Never had an issue with files not backed up properly, test restores work without issue.

Looks like the only files that change while it is running are the clamav & spamhalter db's (and of course log, mail, queue & scratch files)

Potentially, you could miss mail data if, say, a mail folder was being written to at the same time as being backed up, but I have not struck that in ( [:O] has it really been) 7 years.

seems to be the best solution to avoid any risk of corrupted data. Thank you!

it depends on the amount of traffic you have at the point in time when you want a snapshot of the install.

The snapshot isse has gotten headlines here, as the spamassasin bug over new years puts the finger on the need for online services to provide means to incrementally put a system to an exact working state at nearly any given point in time. I don't know of any e-mail server that today is top of the line regarding this, and it certainly isn't ok to stop all services an hour or so every night...

Another way to do this, if you are really concerned about corrupting back-ups would be to use something like TeraByteUnlimited's Image for Windows disk imaging software and invoke PhyLock while imaging is in progress (this is a disk-image rather than a file back-up).  The disk data to be imaged is "frozen" at the time imaging starts and can't be corrupted.  Normal Windows process continue (facilitated by PhyLock) during the image processing activity and Mercury processes will continue.  However, they will be slowed down.  If Mercury is being used as a personal mail-server with just a few users, I don't think that this will be a problem, particularly if the imaging is scheduled for the early hours of the morning, when other user processes are probably at a minimum.  To minimze the size of the image, Mercury could be put in its own disk partition, to avoid imaging a whole lot of other things.  The more well-known Acronis imaging application may be able to do something similar, but I am not familiar with its details.

Gordon

I'm resurrecting a rather old thread here, but only because it illustrates the point I wish to raise.

I used to run a daily (2 copies; current and previous) back-up of the MERCURY directory using a batch file but, for some reason, something changed and the batch file no longer ran.  I would like to put this back again, but I did wonder wherther it was worthwhile doing something to stop Mercury while the back-up was being created, in case mail arrived during what is a fairly long process.  I came across Rolf's command line tool for Mercury referenced in http://community.pmail.com/forums/thread/30032.aspx and I am wondering whether it would be worthwhile using the Mercury stop and start functions available with this tool in the batch script.  The contributions earlier in this thread suggest that it might not be worth it.

Anyone have any opinions on this or, for that matter, whether this tool works with the most recent version of Mercury.

Thank you

Gordon

The command line tool should work with the current version of Mercury although I haven't tested it in a while. Still, in most cases it's probably OK to run a backup without stopping Mercury. For a system with heavy use it might be best to exclude the contents of queue and scratch directories from backup though.

/Rolf 

A warning about unloading Mercury:

While unloading a Server-Process is best practice before doing a file-based backup, Mercury does behave rather against expectations: If you close Mercury, all open mail files are left as they are. Mercury does not flush any of it's data back to disk before closing. Even if you use the "File/Close" menu item, Mercury will just terminate.

This can cause corrupt Index files (PMI) and it will leave files in the Scratch (Temp) directory.

I personally route all traffic through stunnel (for proper SSL and StartTLS encryption) anyway, so I stop stunnel, wait for open connections to clear in Mercury, and then close Mercury. This way, I have a mostly consistent state of the mailbox files.

Greetings

Markus