I bet you as a Zimbra system administrator can easily recall hundreds of times you needed to restore some lost data. Generally, two very common circumstances can badly corner a system administrator:
- A huge disaster jeopardizes the entire server.
- A user accidentally deletes something important.
In both cases, it’s on the system administrators to restore the data. However, Zimbra system administrators have at least once wondered why Zimbra OSE doesn’t have a built-in backup feature and no third-party backup system covers all the needs.
The Solution
When something like previously mentioned disasters happens and a restore is needed, system administrators usually have one of these options:
- Relying on third-party solutions such as scripts found on GitHub which are often obsolete outdated so there is no guarantee they work.
- Manually backing up important files such as mailbox content which is extremely prone to mistakes,
- Handling everything with Zextras Suite relying on innovative and easy to configure features.
You can find out more about Zextras backup and restore features in our whitepaper, including detailed explanations and comparisons.
The Features
- Real-time scanner – It’s constantly active on the mailbox servers and records the changes into the backup destination.
- Snapshot-based backup system – Keeps a frozen copy of a VM in a valid state and rolls back to it when needed. Two main advantages are:
- 100% data consistency,
- Possibility of single item restore.
- Backup Export – Snapshot of the mail system that can be easily used for migration or recovery and includes deduplication and compression.
- Undelete restore function – Retrieves the deleted items of a time interval that has been specified before therefore there is no more need for restoring the whole system.
- Backup on external storage – Allows you to store its data on a third-party store and gives you the possibility of performing backup remotely on a cloud or external storage device.
- Coherency check – Reads the backup metadata and checks if the corresponding blobs are there using the digest function.
- Smart scan – Considers the accounts that have been modified since the last scan. Therefore, it greatly improves performance by decreasing the need for processing resources and time.
- Backup purge – Removes items in the backup path that exceed the retention time specified in the data retention policy.
Increased Performance
Zextras suite backup and restore features are unique for their performance which is mainly the result of the following optimizations:
- Operation optimization – By deduplicating and parallelizing the backup operations thanks to the new internal scheduler. Put simply, the new scheduler keeps track of all changes in the mailbox and puts the operations into a queue with an ultra-light memory structure to be scheduled, deduplicated, and optimized.
- JSON parsing library optimization – The JSON parsing library has been improved. Now it’s faster and can optimize CPU and memory usage, reducing the Garbage Collector activation.
- Taking advantage of multicore architecture – The system administrators can now choose the number of threads to be used.
Download the Whitepaper
We highly recommend you download our whitepaper to find out why Zextras backup and restore features are unique and how they greatly help system administrators and users to have a better Zimbra experience.