16 Oct
2005
16 Oct
'05
6:20 p.m.
On Thu, 2005-10-06 at 17:09 -0400, Geo Carncross wrote:
Mbox on the other hand is much easier. Just make sure your backup software locks the mbox before taking a snapshot and make certain your expunge operations NEVER update the mbox file in place (but instead rename() etc)
Using rename() to overwrite mboxes has two problems:
Uses more disk space so people with filesystem quota wouldn't be able to expunge messages.
A lot of mbox software don't notice the new mbox file, so they keep reading/writing to the old mbox file and that could lose changes. Dovecot checks this though.
Anyway, because of these Dovecot doesn't do the rename()-expunging for mboxes.