On 2013-07-18 14:14, Koenraad Lelong wrote:
I'm going to migrate my company-mailserver to new hardware. I would like to take the opportunity to archive some older mail. But I would like to have it still accessible, would this be possible with dovecot ? I mean, I would like to put that older mail from different users (I got about 50 users) on some read-only media but mount that media in the users mail-dirs. That way I will have less to backup after I backup that old mail and store it safely away. I can't convince my users to really clean up their mailboxes, so I backup more than 100GB mail while the total backup is a bit more than 300GB.
I cannot really answer your question, but seeing that the size of the backups is what triggers your question:
We use Maildir as the mail format and our backups are done using rsync (rsnapshot, to be precise). This seems to scale reasonably well, i.e. rsync just copies those files which need to be copide, and rsnapshot creates hardlinks to previous backups as far as possible. So our nightly backups are actually fairly small, most of them consist of hardlinks to the next older backup we did.
-- Frerich Raabe - raabe@froglogic.com www.froglogic.com - Multi-Platform GUI Testing