backing up email / saving maildir on external hard drives

[Kevin Laurie]

Dear Christian,
Thanks for your feedback.
The HDD will not accept larger than 4GB (as its in FAT format). Its a new
external HDD. Thinking of the best format(that would work with Mac , Win
and Linux) .seems like a challenge.
What's your view on NTFS? And why not exFAT?

Thanks
Kevin

On Saturday, August 8, 2015, Christian Kivalo <ml+dovecot at valo.at> wrote:

>
>
> Am 08. August 2015 06:56:55 MESZ, schrieb Kevin Laurie <
> superinterstellar at gmail.com <javascript:;>>:
> >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
>