I'm planning on an upgrade to my cluster soon. Intending on a clean new build of all 3 nodes, then using mbsync to transfer the mails over. That lets all new indexes get built etc.

Testing has been done in VMs locally, pulling mail in from the existing cluster with mbsync, so I know the process works.

Dean.

On 2024-10-31 12:25 pm, Steven Varco via dovecot wrote:

Hi All

I'm planing to upgrade/migrate my dovecot cluster with two dovecot 2.2.36 nodes to 2.3.16. They use Maildir als IMAP backend and will continue to use that in the future.

Can I just:

• Install a new Server (AlmaLinux 9)
• Stop dovecot on the old node-2
• Copy all the data from the old mail directory of node-2 to the new one
• Install dovecot 2.3 on the new on with more or less the same config and let it run
• Repeat the same with old node-1 ?

Or would it be better to start of with an empty mail directory and let the other old node imapsync the data to the new one? - What would the advantage be (over the disadvantage that it may take some time to get everything synced)?

I know that Maildir are just static files, so moving them to the new server should not be a problem. I'm thinking more about indexes created by dovecot 2.2.36… Are they read without issues with the newever dovecot 2.3.16 or should I consider a re-index. or something the like?

thanks in advance, Steven