On October 20, 2016 at 4:45 PM Konstantin Khomoutov flatworm@users.sourceforge.net wrote:
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
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/
Aki