[Dovecot] Production server migration from mbox to maildir ( need advice )

[Seth Mattinen]

Proskurin Kirill wrote:
> Frank Bonnet wrote:
>>> I use Debian amd64 with maildir. It works. Nothing really to say about
>>> it. It's never given me any trouble and nobody ever complains about
>>> performance. Easy to restore specific messages from backups when
>>> customers accidentally delete messages.
>>>
>>> ~Seth
>>
>> Thank you Seth :-)
> 
> But with your storage you must think about backup strategies.
> Rsync + maildir = many time
> 

The other option is LVM snapshots or a filesystem that has snapshots
like ZFS. Just don't use ext3 with snapshots on a busy server - it's a
horrible performer because it's block-based. Extent-based ones like xfs
perform much better and you can "freeze" an xfs filesystem so the
snapshot is consistent.

This is about MySQL but it has some good information:
http://www.mysqlperformanceblog.com/2009/02/05/disaster-lvm-performance-in-snapshot-mode/

And this Ars article describes the basic snapshot procedure for those
unfamiliar with it:
http://arstechnica.com/open-source/news/2004/10/linux-20041013.ars

~Seth