[Dovecot] Best Cluster Storage

[Ed W]

On 21/01/2011 17:50, Henrique Fernandes wrote:
> I don't know if i got your question right, but before, while using 
> mbox, we had less users and much less quota, it was only 200MB now is 
> about 1GB.  And before we did not have a good backup system, had many 
> problens.
> We pretty much change to maildir to be easie to make incremental 
> backups and etc.

Sorry, the point of the question was simply whether you could use your 
old setup to help estimate whether there is actually any point switching 
from maildir?  Sounds like you didn't have the same backup service back 
then, so you can't compare though?

Just pointing out that it's completely unproven whether moving mdbox 
will actually make a difference anyway...

> And we are considering testing mbdox or sdbox. But still to earlier to 
> make another big change like this.
>

Sure - by the way I believe you can mix mailbox storage formats to a 
large extent?  I'm not using this stuff so please check the docs before 
believing me, but I believe you can mix storage formats even down to the 
folder level under some conditions?  I dare say you did exactly this 
during your migration so I doubt I'm telling you anything new...?

The only point of mentioning that is that you could do something as 
simple as duplicating some proportion of the mailboxes to new "dummy" 
accounts, simply for the purpose of padding out some new format 
directories - users wouldn't really access them.  Then you could try and 
compare the backup times of the original mailboxes (that the users 
actually use) with the duplicated ones in whatever format you are testing?

Just an idea?

Good luck

Ed W