[Dovecot] dsync redesign

[Charles Marcus]

On 2012-03-27 11:47 AM, Micah Anderson <micah at riseup.net> wrote:
> One would be the ability to perform *intelligent* incremental /
> rotated backups. I can do this now by running a dsync backup
> operation and then doing manual hardlinking or moving of the backup
> directories (daily.1, daily.2, weekly.1, monthly.1, etc.), but it
> would be more intelligent if this were baked into the backup process.

There are already numerous tools that do this flawlessly - I've been 
using rsnapshot (which uses rsync) for this for years.

I don't know if Timo should be spending his time reinventing the wheel.

I'm much more interested in dsync working flawlessly to keep one or more 
secondary servers in sync, and leave backups to backup software.

> Lastly, there isn't a good method for restoring backups. I can reverse
> the backup process, onto the user's "live" mailbox, but that brings the
> user into an undesirable state (eg. their mailbox state one day
> ago). Better would be if their backup could be restored in such a way
> that the user can resolve the missing pieces manually, as they know
> best.

Again, best left to the backup software I think?

Although, one interesting piece that I am hopeful I'll be able to 
implement soon (with Timo's professional help) is the ability to easily 
and automatically map my rsnapshot snapshots directory to a read-only 
'Backups' namespace that automatically shows the snapshots by date and 
time as they are produced. This way users could 'go back in time' 
anytime they wanted without having to call me... :)

> thanks again for your work on this, from my position dovecot is an
> amazing piece of software, the only part that seems to have some issues
> is dsync and I applaud the effort to redesign to fix things!

Ditto all of that! :)

-- 

Best regards,

Charles