[Dovecot] Deleted mails in dsync backups

[Timo Sirainen]

On 23.8.2013, at 13.43, Wolfgang.Friebel at desy.de wrote:

> we are doing regular backups of the mdbox mail folders using
> 
> dsync -u username backup mdbox:/somedir/BACKUPS/username
> 
> (still with version 2.1.10, but 2.2.5 is in testing phase)
> We do observe that the directory size in the BACKUPS directory is growing with respect to the original mail folders. I believe this is due to deleted mails not being purged in the backup. We are doing regular
> 
> doveadm purge -A
> 
> cleanups, but this does (of course) not affect the backups and subsequent dsync backup runs seem not to clean up deleted mails in the backup either.
> 
> Will the behaviour of the dsync backup command deal with deleted mails in the 2.2.5 release? If not, what could we do to get rid of the deleted mails in the backup (or is there another reason for the growth in size)

You could run the doveadm purge also on the destination, e.g.:

doveadm -o mail=mdbox:/backups/user purge

I also added -P parameter to do this more easily in v2.2.6: http://hg.dovecot.org/dovecot-2.2/rev/56be613e8ece