backing up email / saving maildir on external hard drives

[Christian Kivalo]

Am 08. August 2015 06:56:55 MESZ, schrieb Kevin Laurie <superinterstellar at gmail.com>:
>Hello,
>Yesterday I tried to back up a 40GB maildir .
>I tried to move the maildir from home to external HDD but failed.
>Decided
>then to compress it(which took several hours). Now changing the disk
>format
>from FAT to exFAT to allow the transfer for the large compressed file.
>
>How does one back up emails on a external drive?
>Some advice would be greatly appreciated.

i backup my maildir with rsync to my home nas.

i assume you are using linux or similar, so when backing up to an external hdd i'd also use rsync to copy over the maildir as is to the external hdd but use a different filesystem n that hdd like ext4 or xfs or anything else than fat/vfat/exfat.

when something goes wrong you can just copy the files back.

what was the error message you got when you tried to copy to the ext. hdd?

regards
- c