I've written this little skript to automatically get rid of older snapshots, create new ones and fill them with data using dbcopy to get a persistent copy of the Groupwise postoffice.

The snapshots get their creation date written into their volumename. Those dates are compared before a new snapshot is created and outdated snapshots get removed before dbcopy is called:

#!/bin/sh

# Source and target for dbcopy

BACKUP_SOURCE=/media/nss/VMPERS/postoffice/
BACKUP_TARGET=/backup/VMPERS/

# Set LVM volume of backup to snapshot
SNAPSHOT_DEVICE=/dev/si076_backup/backup

# Keep snapshots that long
SNAPSHOT_DAYS=2

# Size of snapshot
SNAPSHOT_SIZE=50GB

for snapshot in ${SNAPSHOT_DEVICE}-*; do
    if [ $(echo ${snapshot} |sed -e s\!${SNAPSHOT_DEVICE}-\!\!) \
        -lt $(date -d "${SNAPSHOT_DAYS} days ago" +"%Y%m%d%H%M%S") ]; then
        echo -n "Deleting old snapshot at ${snapshot} ... "
        echo lvremove -f ${snapshot}
        if [ $? -eq 0 ]; then
            echo "OK"
        else
            echo "FAIL"
        fi
    fi
done
echo lvcreate -s -L ${SNAPSHOT_SIZE} \
-n $(basename ${SNAPSHOT_DEVICE})-$(date +"%Y%m%d%H%M%S") ${SNAPSHOT_DEVICE}
/opt/novell/groupwise/agents/bin/dbcopy ${BACKUP_SOURCE} ${BACKUP_TARGET}