Hi Torsten,
You can try installing an IMAP daemon on the old box and use a tool like imapsync to copy existing e-mails to the new box. This will allow you to reduce downtime to the user whose mailbox is being copied at that point in time.
While this goes on, you may need a POP3/IMAP proxy like Perdition to proxy POP3/IMAP4 requests to the correct box that contains their mailstore.
Hope this helps in some way.
Cheers.
On Mon, 19 Mar 2007, Torsten wrote:
Hi List,
what do you think is the best way to migrate (to a new maschine) round about 30000 mboxes (Qpopper) with an amount of 43Gigs data, to maildir format (Dovecot). I think there are two ways:
- stop services (smtp and pop3) on the old maschine
- copy the mboxes to the new maschine
- run a conversion script (for excample: "Perfect_maildir" http://perfectmaildir.home-dn.net/)
- start the services on the new maschine (smtp and Dovecot)
- tell the users to use the new server (from the day X) with the new feature (imap)
- stop the smtp on the old maschine on day X
- leave the old maschine active for a month or so (let users get their "old" mail)
With the first alternative we have a high downtime, because of copying the mboxes and converting the stuff.
What do you think?
Thanks Torsten