On Sat, 22 Oct 2016 05:16:07 -0400, Jerry stated:
On Thu, 20 Oct 2016 20:36:35 +0300, Konstantin Khomoutov stated:
On Thu, 20 Oct 2016 16:57:45 +0300 (EEST) Aki Tuomi aki.tuomi@dovecot.fi wrote:
[...]
Alternatively you can use
dsyncto perform backup with a native Dovecot tool. It's able to sync mailboxes of any Dovecot user -- including synchronizing a mailbox to an empty (yet) spool. You'll need to do a bit of shell scripting which would spin around callingdoveadm user *and feeding its output to something likewhile read user; do
dest="/var/backup/dovecot/$user"; mkdir -p "$dest" && chown vmail:vmail "$dest"
&& chmod 0755 "$dest" dsync -u "$user" backup "maildir:$dest"
doneNote that you will only need this if you don't want to shut down Dovecot to copy its mail spool out.
You can also use doveadm backup -A maildir:%u/
Could you please elaborate?
I have a typical "virtual users" setup where I do have
mail_home = /var/local/mail/%Ln mail_location = maildir:~/mail
and everything is stored with uid=vmail / gid=vmail (much like described in the wiki, that is).
I'd like to use a single call to
doveadm backup -A ...to back up the whole /var/local/mail/* to another location (say, /var/backups/dovecot/) so that is has the same structure, just synchronized with the spool. (The purpose is to then backup the replica off-site).I tried to call
doveadm backup -A maildir:/var/backups/dovecot/%u
and it created a directory "/var/backups/dovecot/%u" (with literal "%u", that is), created what appeared to be a single mailbox structure under it and after a while scared a heck out of me with a series of error messages reading
dsync(user1): Error: Mailbox INBOX sync: mailbox_delete failed: INBOX can't be deleted. dsync(user2): Error: Mailbox INBOX sync: mailbox_delete failed: INBOX can't be deleted. ...
for each existing user.
It appears that it luckily failed to delete anything in the source directory (though I have no idea what it actually tried to do).
Reading the doveadm-backup(1) multiple times still failed to shed a light for me on how to actually backup the whole maildir hierarchy for all existing users.
So, the question: how do I really should go about backing up the whole mailbox hierarchy in the case of virtual users?
I am experiencing the same problem as Konstantin. Is this a bug or expected behavior.
Has anyone looked into this?