[Dovecot] incremental backups of maildir via rsync

[Wojciech Puchar]

> I would like to do incremental backups of the users' maildir
> directories to a dedicated backup host (using "rsync -SHa"
> and rsnapshot).

dont use it.

use rsync -b option. It is MUCH MUCH BETTER.

i use it regularly.

Split your rsync session if you have huge amount of users or rsync would 
be taking enormous amount of RAM and have larger chance to fail.

> Problem is: Dovecot bloats the incremental backup by changing
> the file names again and again.

I didn't observe that except when moving from "new" to "cur"

but --detect-renamed fixes it.

>
> Is there some way to tell Dovecot to keep meta information
> separate from the file names?
>
it already do this.

exclude dovecot indexes from backup



PS. rsync backup is what i use regularly. Except none of my servers are 
purely mail server.