[Dovecot] Any suggestions for backing up an imap server and whould maildir or dbox be better than mbox?

[Götz Reinicke]

Hi,

Eduardo M KALINOWSKI schrieb:
> From: Götz Reinicke 
>> Hi,
>>
>> we run a Red Hat EL 5.2 mailserver with dovecot as the imap server. 
>> Mails are stored in mbox format and there are about 134GB of mail.
>>
>> At the moment users copy their importent mail to their workstation 
>> accounts wich are backed up nightly.
>>
>> What are your suggestions to back up the mails not copied? Thanks for 
>> any comments.
> 
> You can simply rsync the whole mail store. Gets pretty efficient after the first run. Or take a look at rdiff-backup if you need to store previous copies.


thanks for the idea! I'll try it. I've one more question: What will
happen to files which are locked or opend; e.g. if users are still
logged in?

> 
>> BTW: Dose changing the mailbox format from mbox to Maildir or dbox dose 
>> have any advantages?
> 
> I don't think it makes any difference in this case.

I thought about the filelocking, so if the mailbox is one big file
backing up things will be different from backing up a lot of smaler
files... But may be rsync dose handel this also in a different way?

Thanks once more

Regards

Götz
-- 
Götz Reinicke
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