[Dovecot] Anyone successfully setup Continous Backup of mailboxes using rsync ?

[Alexander Hoogerhuis]

On 29.01.2010 08:59, Timo Sirainen wrote:
> On 29.1.2010, at 7.57, Luigi Rosa wrote:
>
>> Timo Sirainen said the following on 29/01/10 06:48:
>>
>>> The main potential problem with that is that if a message's flag is
>>> changed, the filename changes so it's now stored twice in the backup
>>> server. So when restoring mails, be sure not to restore duplicates.
>>
>> Using a different dedicated directory for restored messages could lead to the
>> same problem?
>
> If you didn't give --delete parameter to rsync, there could be duplicates, yes. Dovecot just logs about them and gives new UIDs to them, so you'll end up having duplicate mails. I suppose some day I should just change it to log a warning, but delete if the files are otherwise identical.
>

Using rsync will have the flags issue and others to be dealt with; lvm 
(or any other kind) of snapshot and rdiff-backup gives you a consistent 
snapshot, as well as the option of saving a lot of space and time as 
only changes gets backed up. As a bonus you can also restore anything to 
a given point in time, either induvidual messages or whole folders or 
even the whole mailbox.

-A