[Dovecot] Archiving mail

[Frerich Raabe]

On 2013-07-18 14:14, Koenraad Lelong wrote:
> I'm going to migrate my company-mailserver to new hardware. I would
> like to take the opportunity to archive some older mail. But I would
> like to have it still accessible, would this be possible with dovecot
> ?
> I mean, I would like to put that older mail from different users (I
> got about 50 users) on some read-only media but mount that media in
> the users mail-dirs. That way I will have less to backup after I
> backup that old mail and store it safely away.
> I can't convince my users to really clean up their mailboxes, so I
> backup more than 100GB mail while the total backup is a bit more than
> 300GB.

I cannot really answer your question, but seeing that the size of the
backups is what triggers your question:

We use Maildir as the mail format and our backups are done using
rsync (rsnapshot, to be precise). This seems to scale reasonably well, 
i.e.
rsync just copies those files which need to be copide, and rsnapshot
creates hardlinks to previous backups as far as possible. So our 
nightly
backups are actually fairly small, most of them consist of hardlinks to
the next older backup we did.

-- 
Frerich Raabe - raabe at froglogic.com
www.froglogic.com - Multi-Platform GUI Testing