i think there’s a golden rule in system administration: never underestimate the importance of backups. i have a few small scripts that you can use with rsync or just local that i decided may be useful, and i’m going to share them here. maybe later on when i master rsync, i’ll post a tutorial about it here as well.
a mysql backup may work for you as follows:
mysqldump -A –password=xxxxxx | gzip > /root/mysql_backup/`date +%m%d%y_%T`.sql.gz
on the other hand, if you want to backup all qmail for a particular domain, you can attempt to do a job as such:
tar zcvf /root/domain/mailbackup-`date +%m%d%y_%T`.tar.gz /var/qmail/mailnames/domain.com/
i have a cron job that runs nightly to execute these tasks, and i find them rather useful, especially since the inclusion of the timestamp gives me an idea of what could have happened and when.