[Dovecot] Using a namespace for providing access to mail snapshots for user based on-demand restoration of email backups

[Timo Sirainen]

On 5.4.2012, at 18.28, Charles Marcus wrote:

> The snapshots are stored with the following filesystem layout:
> 
> /path/to/snapshotsdir/hourly.0
> ...
> /path/to/snapshotsdir/hourly.4
> /path/to/snapshotsdir/daily.0
..
> The 'names' (hourly, daily, weekly, monthly, yearly) are arbitrary (this is a bit confusing to people new to rsnapshot), and would *not* be used for displaying the mail folders to the users - it is the Date/Time stamps of each of the snapshot dirs above that would be used to display the folder names under the 'Time Machine' namespace. This is, I imagine, the part that will need some actual coding by Timo to get working - maybe just some new config variables added to the namespace code for mapping the date/time stamps of the directories to user friendly folder names in the namespace.

I guess there could be kind of a "filter fs layout" that modifies the filesystem layout a bit and lets the underlying layout handle the rest:

namespace {
  location = maildir:/path/to/snapshotsdir:LAYOUT=timestamp
}

Although it's annoying that it's not possible to have per-layout settings currently.. But I guess if this was implemented as plugin it would be enough to have:

plugin {
  timestamp_layout = maildir++
}