Disk space usage with mdbox

[Alexandros Soumplis]

Daniel thank you for the advice, I have done this exact procedure to 
clean up some space and I reduced the used space by more than 60% (huge 
gain!). Yet it is still a mystery why this happened first place and more 
important if it will occur again, time will tell. I have kept one 
mailbox out of this procedure (the "live" size is 8,8G, the backup size 
is less than 1GB) to do some testing or debugging if possible.

Another question I am not able to answer is if this procedure cleans up 
potentialy orphaned attachments as I store them seperately for SiS to work.

a.


On 04/04/15 02:40, Daniel Miller wrote:
> Shot in the dark here...haven't tried it myself so no promises. 
> There's probably a much better way to do this but sometimes a little 
> "brute force" helps.
>
> Theoretical steps:
> 1.  Stop all mail processes - both SMTP and IMAP.
> 2.  Use "doveadm sync" to backup the user mailbox, e.g.,
>     doveadm backup -u user mdbox:/tmp/usermail
> 3.  Verify /tmp/usermail looks reasonable
> 4.  Move the user's mail store somewhere else, e.g. /tmp/useroldmail
> 5.  Move /tmp/usermail to the user's mailstore
> 6.  Verify file permissions are set correctly in the mailstore
> 7.  Start the mail processes...and test.
>
> -- 
> Daniel
>
> On 4/3/2015 1:04 PM, Alexandros Soumplis wrote:
>> Nobody any suggestions ?
>>
>>
>> On 02/04/15 10:09, Alexandros Soumplis wrote:
>>> Yes I have done it, it is the third command I have run, without any 
>>> change.
>>>
>>> a.
>>>
>>>
>>> On 02/04/2015 09:53 πμ, Urban Loesch wrote:
>>>> Did you "purged" the deleted mails for this user?
>>>> On mdbox you must run "doveadm purge -u $USER" to whipe out any as 
>>>> deleted marked mails etc.
>>>>
>>>> Details: http://wiki2.dovecot.org/Tools/Doveadm/Purge
>>>>
>>>> I use a nightly cronjob wor this.
>>>>
>>>> Regards
>>>> Urban
>>>>
>>>> Am 01.04.2015 um 23:26 schrieb Alexandros Soumplis:
>>>>> Hello,
>>>>>
>>>>> I am using dovecot with mdbox+sis and I notice an ever increasing 
>>>>> disk space usage since I converted mailboxes from Maildir to 
>>>>> mdboxes. I have checked
>>>>> with a user and while it actually uses only 65K, his mdbox files 
>>>>> on disk are more than 6G. The backup of his mailbox is just 64K. 
>>>>> Any suggestions ?
>>>>>
>>>>> Below are some relevant commands:
>>>>>
>>>>> [root at mail ~]# doveadm quota get -u test
>>>>> Quota name Type    Value Limit %
>>>>> User quota STORAGE 10135 31457280 0
>>>>> User quota MESSAGE   186 - 0
>>>>>
>>>>> [root at mail ~]# du -k --max-depth=1 /mdboxes/test/
>>>>> 220    /mdboxes/test/mailboxes
>>>>> 6029348    /mdboxes/test/storage
>>>>> 6029592    /mdboxes/test/
>>>>>
>>>>> [root at mail ~]# doveadm purge -u test
>>>>> [root at mail ~]# du -k --max-depth=1 /mdboxes/test/
>>>>> 220    /mdboxes/test/mailboxes
>>>>> 6029348    /mdboxes/test/storage
>>>>> 6029592    /mdboxes/test/
>>>>>
>>>>> [root at mail ~]# doveadm backup -u test mdbox:/tmp/MDBOX_TEMP/
>>>>> [root at mail ~]# du -k --max-depth=1 /tmp/MDBOX_TEMP/
>>>>> 16    /tmp/MDBOX_TEMP/mailboxes
>>>>> 65540    /tmp/MDBOX_TEMP/storage
>>>>> 65568    /tmp/MDBOX_TEMP/
>>>>>
>>>
>>>