[Dovecot] Questions about single intance storage

[Joseba Torre]

El 04/12/11 21:16, Terry Carmen escribió:
>> So I was thinking that there probably could be some tool that during a
>> user's backup it would write the attachments among the user's other
>> files, so it would be easy to find all of the files needed for a
>> restore. This would of course mean that backups can take a lot more
>> space, because there's no SIS. Perhaps there could be some other
>
>
> I see.
>
> Instead of writing the links directly to the filesystem, why not keep a
> links list (not a linked list 8-)) file in each directory that contains
> the information for the links that should be there (source, dest,
> attributes), then add an inotify hook in Dovecot to create/update/delete
> the hard links in the directory so they match the links list?
>
> The links list would only need to be opened when there's a change and
> could remain closed (and backup-able) at all other times, and restoring
> a links list would immediately trigger the inotify hook and regenerate
> all the required links.
>
> Terry

Sorry for joining late this thread, but this is a very important issue 
for us.

Terry's solution feels great: just a little modification of the mdbox, 
adding a ¿text? file with the list of attachment files, that is modified 
every time an attachment is added/deleted.

With that, it seems quite easy to modify our mailbox recovery script to 
something like:
- recover the mailbox as now
- recover every attachment file that file points to.

Other option: a new doveadm option that could generate this list, and 
then recover the mailbox, generate the list, recover the attachments.

Also: no change needed to the backup process itself, and that's good news.