Backing up the Zimbra server on a regular basis can help you quickly restore your mail service if an unexpected crash occurs or individual accounts need to be restored.
See the Backup and Restore chapter in the Administrator's Guide for information about how Zimbra data is backed up and restored and for information and general guidelines for disaster recovery. Additional backup commands are available from the CLI.
When ZCS was installed, a backup schedule was automatically added to the cron table. The default full backup is scheduled for 1:00 A.M. every Sunday. The default incremental backups are scheduled for 1:00 A.M., Monday through Saturday. You can also run the backup at any time from Backups on the administration console.
From Backups, you can perform the following backup and restore processes:
Immediately start a full or incremental backup
A full backup of all accounts or selected accounts can be run. This process backs up all the information needed to restore mailboxes, including the LDAP directory server, database, index directory, and message directory for each mailbox.
An incremental backup process backs up the LDAP directory server and gathers all the redo log transactions written since the last incremental backup or the last full backup, if this is the first incremental since the last full backup. Incremental backups backup all accounts.
Restore mailbox accounts
Restoring an account performs a full restore and incremental restore for the designated mailboxes.
View a list of the backup labels, which includes the start time, end time, and status
Each run of full or incremental backup creates a backup session which is automatically labeled by date and time. The backup labels are listed on the Backups content pane.
View accounts that were backed up and errors that were generated during the backup session.
Abort a backup that is in progress
You can stop a full backup that is in progress. The backup is immediately stopped and the files are marked as a failed session.
Click Refresh on the Backups toolbar to display the latest results for backups.
Each run of full or incremental backups creates a backup session. These sessions are listed under the specific server in Backups. When you click on Backups in the navigation pane, the servers are displayed in the content pane with the last backup session listed. Click on a specific server to see all the backup sessions for the last 30 days.