[Dovecot] mailbox backup

[Wouter Van Hemel]

On Thu, 21 Oct 2004, Faisal wrote:

> I am changing my linux distro .. to slackware from fendora core .. but
> dovecot/postfix  will remain the same , what are the steps involved
> inbacking up all my users mailboxes & then resotring again .. i have never
> done this sucessfully so please help me out ..
> users are authenticated via /etc/passwd
>

First of all, may I suggest to you to read a book about unix/posix systems 
and to check some online sources of information, such as the documentation 
of your MTA. Only you can know where you store mailboxes and how the 
software on your machine has been configured.

Check the configuration files of your MTA (sendmail, postfix?) and 
dovecot's configuration file, dovecot.conf to see where mail is delivered; 
the inboxes can probably be found in /var/mail or thereabouts depending on 
the exact OS and MTA you are using.

If you have never done this before and don't know much about unix-like 
systems, practice backing up and restoring on non-production servers 
first. Really.