Maybe everyone is waiting for someone smarter than themselves to answer this.. :-)

Maybe... but at the same time, there's a risk of me abandoning Dsync for rsync or something else that I know I could have implemented by now with far less frustration ! However I'm keen to learn how to utilise the power within Dsync.... ;-)

So.. hoping I read and understood your email correctly ...

Hoping that email wasn't too confusing ;-(

The first thing you tried failed because only root can change permissions, except for using the setuid bit which is probably not what you want here. The second might have failed because of:

userdb { args = username_format=%u /etc/dovecot/users driver = passwd-file }

dsync is using userdb and not authdb because it's not checking a password here. Can it be that its-virtmail doesn't have permission to read /etc/dovecot/users ?

hmmm ... its chmod 640 root:dovecot on the primary server and the same on the backup box. Do I need to mess around with permissions on both or just the backup box ?

I was under the impression that Dsync was just a more modern version of a doveadm tool that went by a similar name and hence assumed it would use dovecot permissions.

But then again, who knows... I was getting very confused at the end of a long day trying to make it work !

perhaps many people are on holidays in summer, however seems in your orig post you used 2.0.19 version there were a lot of updates perhaps first update 2.1.17 or 2.2.5 then retry

True true... although from my point of view its hard not to be tempted to use rsync or something else that I know. But as I said to a previous respondent, I'm keen to get to know (and hopefully love) my new dovecot install !

I'm on an Ubuntu LTS release so the dovecot came from their release. I'd prefer to stay that way unless I really have to...especially if the only reason for doing so is to fix Dsync. 2.0.19 seems to otherwise working ok ! Maybe I'll have a look through the release notes on a rainy day !

also seems you have some permission problems

failed: Permission denied (euid=1002(its_scripts) egid=1002(its_scripts) missing +r perm: /var/run/dovecot/auth-userdb, dir owned by 0:0 mode=0755)

Hmmm... I think I tried that at some point, I think that was when the problem might have morphed into ...

dsync(its-virtmail): Error: user test@somewhere.example.com: Initialization failed: mail_location not set and autodetection failed: Mail storage autodetection failed with home=/srv/mail/example.com/test dsync(its-virtmail): Fatal: User init failed dsync-local(test@somewhere.example.com): Error: read() from worker server failed: EOF

But I'll give it another go tomorrow.