Mercian Labels-a UK SME Label Printer on Open Source migration

Sometimes I never learn, and check that backups are working as they should be.  Last night we had a zimbra failure that resulted in the default backup schedule not being run (incremental backup at 01:00), which measn that when we had to have a fresh install today we lost all yesterdays emails, calendar changes and additions, everything.

Yesterday I spent all day writing up 3 tactical plans for the business, and lost them all becuase of this.  Fortunately I got some of the work back from a syncd copy on a PDA, but not everything.  This episode also dented our team’s confidence in Zimbra as its the second time it has happened.

We have now improved the backup regime to daily full backups and hourly incremental ones.  We did this by changing the zimbra backup cron job using WEBMIN on port 10000 on our ubuntu server using the nice GUI webpage, and it seems to work.

A lesson for other new zimbra users, the default backups just ain’t enough, so update your instalation NOW to get more backups!

Lesson learnt the hard way (again).

Mercian Labels has never had a support contract for our IT, despite the fact that its a mission critical for us.  Last year we took out a support contract with Senokian for the first time to guide us through the process, and I’m pleased to say that wea re going to renew it.

The service from Jake and Dave in particular has been great, and although we are only a small customer, they have been very helpful to us.  I’d recommend their service to other SMEs looking for REAL open source software support.  Its their core business, not an “add on”, and that matters.