On Thu, 20 Oct 2016 09:18:12 -0400 Jerry <jerry@seibercom.net> wrote:
I am running Dovecot with Postfix on a FreeBSD machine. There are problems with the drive and I cannot depend on it. Dovecot saves all mail in IMAP format. I want to back up the mail folders, install a new HD, install the latest FreeBSD OS and then reinstall my programs. Reinstalling Dovecot is simple, but how do I reinstall the IMAP folders? Can Dovecot backup the folders onto a CD and then import them when I reinstall it? My mail is kept under “/var/mail/vmail”. Should I just back up that entire directory structure and then restore it later?
That should work (just make sure Dovecot is not running to not have a race between your backup software and the IMAP server and clients).
Alternatively you can use dsync to 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
calling doveadm user * and feeding its output to something like
while read user; do
dest="/var/backup/dovecot/$user";
mkdir -p "$dest" && chown vmail:vmail "$dest"
&& chmod 0755 "$dest"
dsync -u "$user" backup "maildir:$dest"
done
Note that you will only need this if you don't want to shut down Dovecot to copy its mail spool out.