Options for hosting email through InterWorx, but storing on another hard drive

Having an SSD for hosting is nice, but as the storage increase the cost go up. Most of the storage my server uses now is clients with large inboxes. My first guess is there is no good way to do this, but I thought i would ask to see if anyone else has tried something like this.

The simplest idea I had that seems like it should work, but not sure if there are any “gotchas” I’m not seeing is just adding in a regular SATA drive as an additional drive and then doing a symbolic link for the mail directory (/home/account/var/account.com/mail ) in the Siteworx account. Would copy the data over first to the new drive / location, stop mail services, rename (eventually delete local mail folder) then add the symlink to the mail directory. Yes, this would have to be done on a site by site basis. Not sure if this would affect a SiteWorx backup? Would R1Soft backup handling this automatically?

Would something like this work? Any other ideas?

Thanks!

Hi justec

Sorry I read your post last night and hope your well

I think your correct and I cannot see why it would not work in general as long as all perms etc were correct

R1soft would backup all drives, so this would be covered. However, R1restore would I think only restore the symlink and mail in that instance. R1soft would not follow symlink I believe

I would also think if you needed to run varpermsfix.pex it would not follow symlink but may also remove your symlink (sorry never tested this)

I think qmail or dovecot may hold where to place the email but must be coded also within IW-CP

Have you run a test to see if it works

Might be a good idea to ask IW

Many thanks

John

Hi John, thanks for your feedback. Does anyone from IW read these forums usually? Or should I just open up a direct support ticket / sales question with them? Normally for support stuff I’m supposed to go through my hosting company, but seems like a lot of unnecessary middle man for this question.

Hi justec

Yes IW read forums and I also forwarded your thread as been able to move the mail folders does appear to be a good idea although I can understand why it was setup that way and some potential issues if outside home directory.

You could also send support interworx an email and quote your thread. I am sure they would not mind

Have you tried a test yet and please update your post

Many thanks

John

I’m going to setup a test domain I on my production server and give it a try. Maybe with just a single mail account instead of a whole test SiteWorx domain and see how it goes. I will update this post after testing further.

Hello!

I spoke to the dev team this afternoon at our daily meeting about your question. They said that they believe the SiteWorx backup will honor symlinks and so it should potentially backup the email, as well, if it is located on a different partition. However, since it is an unsupported set up, some testing would be needed. I was going to try my own test later today or tomorrow and let you know what I found but it looks like you’re already on it. :slight_smile: Let me know how it works out and if there is anything I can help you out with! (Our meeting was at 2 EST, and just ended, so I just saw your response).

Regarding forum presence–John is super awesome at forwarding questions like this to us so we can take a look. Right now it’s basically just me running support and answering questions, but we’re expanding, so my goal is to soon be able to set aside more time to check into the forums more often. :slight_smile:

Hi Jenna, yes, I remember you came into one of my last post about CPanel import issues, after John pointed you to it :slight_smile:
John has been great to have around the forums these last several years. It’s always good to know when I haven’t been around for a few months, when I come back, someone else will be here.

I did a quick test with a live domain that isn’t really being used. I set up a new email account, then moved the the one inbox folder to my second hard drive. Then did the symlink and just sent a few emails in and out and it’s working perfectly. I’ll see how R1Soft handles it with it’s backup later tonight, but so far so good!

I moved my own 6GB+ inbox over to this other drive and it’s working perfectly as well. I forgot to add this other drive to the disk safe on R1, so it didn’t backup last night, but I’ve added it now so next R1 should capture it. Not sure how that will work with the SiteWorx R1soft plugin for restoring, but honestly if something happens with an inbox my clients would call me anyway and not handle that on their own anyway. I think this plan is going to work well for my needs!

Hi justec

Excellent news if it?s working well

I do believe R1soft restore (siteworx access) would not honour symlink

I could be wrong sorry, but from my experience it just replaces files/folders and if you log into R1soft to see whole of backups, it lists symlink such as /home symlink to /Chroot/home but to browse /home, you cannot click symlink and have to go into /chroot then /home

Also, have you tried varpermsfix.pex to see if that breaks the symlink or honour it. Varpermsfix.pex can be used just on a single siteworx

Many thanks

John

Yeah, I doubt R1soft SiteWorx level restore will work correctly, but not really a problem for my case, but I will test to see once I have a good backup.

How would I test varpermsfix.pex on a single account? Would I need to manually make the permissions wrong before running to test that it worked as expected?

Hi justec

Many thanks

If you man varpermsfix.pex it should let you know or I think from a rusty memory it is ./varpermsfix.pex ? siteworx-domain

Replace siteworx-domain with the test siteworx account

I would just change 1 file permission and check if it corrects it - it should

Many thanks

John

I tested this with a regular inbox (on main drive) in the same account and it worked. It actually fixed the symlink that had the wrong permissions on it too.

Hi justec

Excellent news… kudos to you

How did R1soft restore work

Many thanks

John

With R1Soft I am able to easily backup the mail by making sure I include the additional hard drive storage in the files to be backed up. As far as restoring the files, they have to be restored directly from that additional drive, not from within the SiteWorx account because R1soft doesn’t follow symlinks, just backs the symlink itself. So with this setup, it would not allow an end user to go into R1soft SiteWorx restore and access the backup of emails with this current setup. Not a big deal for me, as long as I know if I need to I can actually restore the data, which I can.

Maybe in the future if this seems like a worthwhile feature to include out of the box, the SiteWorx R1soft plugin would be able to search an additional email storage area and allow the restore for end users.

Something else I just realized, is the disk quota. Is there anything special I need to do to have the data on the second drive count against the SiteWorx account quota? Or do I just need to enabling CentOS quota on that drive?

Basically just changing the fstab from this…

/               ext4 defaults,usrquota,grpquota
/iwmailstorage  ext4 defaults

To…

/               ext4 defaults,usrquota,grpquota
/iwmailstorage  ext4 defaults,usrquota,grpquota

Hi justec

I believe you would need to turn on quotas as you posted

As the symlink is been honoured, the quota count should be correct I would have thought

Thanks for confirming R1soft restore from a siteworx user point

Many thanks

John