[Dovecot] Backup Maildir

[Rory Campbell-Lange]

On 06/10/05, Odhiambo Washington (wash at wananchi.com) wrote:
> * On 06/10/05 16:06 +0100, Gabe Granger wrote:
> > I'm currently doing nightly full backups of /home.  I'm not sure if a  
> > full back up is the best way to do backups.  I know with my  
> > fileserver i do weekly full backup and daily incremental which would  
> > file on those type of files.  I guess my question to the group is,  
> > how do you guys backup Maildir? whats the best way of doing it?
...

> How do you backup e-mails for users when during the backup, they are
> deleting the e-mails from the Maildir (POPping) and at the same, and
> the SMTP server is also writing to it. 
...

One way was along the lines of our discussion some time ago on Exim
list, to deliver to either a global or per-user backup pool of messages
which are only deleted after the backup system has seen them (or
possibly deleted by the backup itself).

At one client we use the global backup system, and store the headers in
an sql database, together with the exim message id and the md5sum of the
file.

Not very good for restoring mailboxes/maildirs though. Sorry for the
digression!

Cheers
Rory

-- 
Rory Campbell-Lange 
<rory at campbell-lange.net>
<www.campbell-lange.net>