On Tue, Feb 08, 2011 at 08:42:40AM +0100, Javier Miguel RodrÃguez wrote:
I am writing to this mailing list to thanks Timo for dovecot 2 &mdbox. We have almost 30.000 active users and our life was sad with Maildir & backup: 24 hours for a full backup with bacula (zlib enabled maildirs, 1.4 TB). After switching to mdbox, the backup time is under 12 hours ! Instead of backing 17 millions files, with mdbox our backup is only of 1 million files, and that speeds up a lot the backup operation.
Oh.. I envy you. Will probably need to do the same at some point, but I'm having problems understanding how we will ever be able to make the transition. Too many files -- too many users..
How long did it take to convert from maildir to mdbox, how much downtime ?
Do you have a clustered setup, or single node? I'm wondering how safe mdbox will be on a clusterfs (GPFS), as we've had a bit of trouble with the index-files when they're accessed from multiple nodes at the same time (but that was with v1.0.15 -- so we should maybe trust that such problems has since been fixed :-)
-jf