[Dovecot] Backup Maildir

[Timo Sirainen]

On Thu, 2005-10-06 at 17:09 -0400, Geo Carncross wrote:

> Mbox on the other hand is much easier. Just make sure your backup
> software locks the mbox before taking a snapshot and make certain your
> expunge operations NEVER update the mbox file in place (but instead
> rename() etc)

Using rename() to overwrite mboxes has two problems:

1) Uses more disk space so people with filesystem quota wouldn't be able
to expunge messages.

2) A lot of mbox software don't notice the new mbox file, so they keep
reading/writing to the old mbox file and that could lose changes.
Dovecot checks this though.

Anyway, because of these Dovecot doesn't do the rename()-expunging for
mboxes.
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