backing up email / saving maildir on external hard drives

[Götz Reinicke - IT Koordinator]

Hi Kevin,

if you use maildir, I bet there is not a single mail bigger than 100 MB.
So ALL mails are 40 GB, but may be hundreds and thousands small ones ...?

Or did you compress all files in one 40GB tar/gz/zip/... ?

So fat32 is good for small files.

BUT if you like to transfer as well e.g. DVD iso images larger than > 4
GB that might be a problem.

From what I think is good for you to go with, you could do a "rsync ...
magic needed options" that maildir to the FAT32 Disk.

So you can read it on all systems without extra tools.

Furthermore if you want to do an other backup or "update" your files run
an other rsync ... so you dont have to compress a big archive all the time.

As the others pointed out, what do you want to do, what is your requirement?

Especially in a Linux/Mac/Win World there is no one sizes fits all.

An other thing is: If you dont need to move your external disk around a
lot or take it with you on the go, think of a NAS; e.g. two disks,
mirrored raid so you can access it without big problems from all OSs ..


my2cents. /Götz



Am 08.08.15 um 18:15 schrieb 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
>>



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