Proposal for External Storage of Mail Data in VM Environment

[cuthbertdavies]

Is there a method for storing all Postfix spool, mail, spamassassin/mailscanner user mods, etc., off the VM and onto a network share? If not, perhaps this could be considered as a feature request. If the VM becomes corrupted for any reason, restoring a backup results in the loss of all mail data between the time of corruption and the backup date. Having everything off the VM would mitigate this issue and likely facilitate easier migration between versions.

[shawniverson]

You can set up your initial install before you install eFa however you want.

You could install your OS and create mount points for these various things, then install eFa once you have it the way you want. Of course, you'll incur any performance penalty that using a network share brings.

[pdwalker]

Serious question

How many times have you had a vm corrupted?

I've been running efa in a vm for 9 years now and I've had 0 crashes or corruptions.

Has anyone ever had a vm go bad? Is this a problem you really need to solve?

Efa only filters mail. It is not a mail server. Let's assume worst case and you have to completely restore a week old VM and thus EFA cannot show you the last week of messages - does it really matter?

Your mail server, which is the ultimate destination of the messages filtered by efa, will still have all their messages.

If you store important data on a network share, you run additional risks of having strange issues if your network ever has problems. In my experience, this increases your risk of having problems.