Mailboxes are in Maildir format. Any good backup tips? Had success with version control?

[Jiri Bourek]

On 1.7.2014 00:28, deoren wrote:
> I'm still pretty new to running a mail server, but one thing I've come
> to appreciate over the years is a good backup strategy. Since I have
> always run my own servers for practice and for personal use I don't have
> access to Enterprise backup solutions. Because of that I usually just
> fall back to scripts and tarballs and offload the content on a regular
> basis.
>
> Right now I'm using LVM snapshots + tarballs for daily backups, but I'd
> like to get better coverage for incremental changes that occur
> throughout the day. The size of existing content is low, but (small)
> changes are frequent.
>
> I went with Maildir format because based on my reading it is referred to
> as time tested and corruption resistant. Because individual emails are
> stored as separate files this also leads me to believe that a version
> control system (Git, SVN) would allow for easy point in time restores.
>
> I'm also going to research the GNU tar utility's support for incremental
> archives as that sounds promising.
>
> Suggestions and warnings are most welcome.
>
> Thanks!

Since you're using maildir, you might want to check rsync out as well, 
especially with --link-dest. In short, you call rsync on your backup 
machine like this:

rsync --link-dest=previous-backup-dir source new-backup-dir

This compares current files with their copies in previous backup. All 
files which didn't change are hardlinked, saving storage space.