Re: Assistance with doveadm backup...

On Wed, 20 Feb 2019, SH Development wrote:

To: Joan Moreau via dovecot dovecot@dovecot.org

Jean did take over the list for a while when developing his FTS backend, so you can be forgiven that he actually runs this list.

2. It was also suggested to rsync the directory, but the question was brought up, and not answered, about whether it was advisable to copy live mail, thus the need for doveadm sync/backup.

You're right that consistency is a problem if you rsync a large amount of changing data. (If I remember correctly, mdbox is especially sensitive to content/index mismatches.)

One way this can be done is via filesystem magic i.e. filesystems with copy-on-write that allow you to take a moment in time snapshot of your entire filesystem e.g. LVM, ZFS and others. You can then rsync the snapshot, but some of these filesystem also support methods to export snapshots to a remote filesystem.

Joseph Tam jtam.home@gmail.com