Rainmail Server provides a backup/restore facility. Normally, backups are taken automatically at 11PM every night and is placed in a folder in the local hard drive. On Saturday nights, a full backup is taken. On other days, an incremental backup is taken. The backup consists of

1. Rainmail Configuration, and
2. Full user data

and does not contain

1. Operating System binaries
2. System Binaries
3. Other OS files (kernel, etc.)

In case of a system crash, this backup can be used to restore the system. Rainmail keeps latest 3 days of backup and deletes the older backups automatically. The backup files are stored in the following directory:

• /usr/share/smb/backup

Normally, these files can also be accessed from the following path

• /home/mailservice/backup

The backup files are named as follows: 

backup.20091204.tgz.aa

1. Date of backup is the second string (in above example, 20091204). The date is in YYYYMMDD format. 20091204 means the backup was taken on 4 December 2009.
2. The third string (tgz) specifies the format backup is stored in. By default, Rainmail stores backup in zipped tar format.
3. The last string (.aa) will be present if the backup is greater than 2GB. If the total backup is greater than 2GB, Rainmail splits the backup into files of 2GB each. Each of the split file has an extension that says which split the file belongs to. The split files carry the extension (from the first) as follows
   • aa
   • ab
   • ac
   • ... and so on till
   • az
   • ba
   • bb and so on..