Brent Clark wrote:

Hi all

My imap server is getting to the stange where I need to start worring about the disk usage.

Due to the number of users we seem to be hiring, I need to start looking at a new mail server, suppose its a blessing in disguise too.

Would it be ok to just tar my current users mail (there home directory, I dont use virtual setup) and the untar it on the new mail server.

Is there anything that dovecot on the new machine will complain about. Obviously I would tar everything, indexes etc.

Just something I was wondering.

I'm not an expert, but you could use tar or for that matter use rsync to do periodic updates from the old to the new with the final update being after hours when everyone is off the system. rsync has options to preserve permissions and owners. I think this would do nicely.

The advantage with rsync is that the first update would be huge and take many hours and really hog up the CPU/network/IO. But you can rate limit rsync so it might run for a day but with a low enough performance that no one really notices. After this, you can continue doing incremental backups with less data, higher data rates, for faster synchronizations. Last day, you just knock everyone off the server and go full blast.

I would kill the indexes though. They can be rebuilt and that way you know they are valid. Might make the first day a bit ugly but if you were really bent on keeping the performance up, you could keep the indexes and hope they are 100% or write a script to Peek at everyones directories, forcing an index build.