Backing up and Importing IMAP folders

[Aki Tuomi]

> On October 20, 2016 at 4:45 PM Konstantin Khomoutov <flatworm at users.sourceforge.net> wrote:
> 
> 
> On Thu, 20 Oct 2016 09:18:12 -0400
> Jerry <jerry at seibercom.net> wrote:
> 
> > I am running Dovecot with Postfix on a FreeBSD machine. There are
> > problems with the drive and I cannot depend on it. Dovecot saves all
> > mail in IMAP format. I want to back up the mail folders, install a new
> > HD, install the latest FreeBSD OS and then reinstall my programs.
> > Reinstalling Dovecot is simple, but how do I reinstall the IMAP
> > folders? Can Dovecot backup the folders onto a CD and then import them
> > when I reinstall it? My mail is kept under “/var/mail/vmail”. Should I
> > just back up that entire directory structure and then restore it
> > later?
> 
> That should work (just make sure Dovecot is not running to not have a
> race between your backup software and the IMAP server and clients).
> 
> Alternatively you can use `dsync` to perform backup with a native
> Dovecot tool.  It's able to sync mailboxes of any Dovecot user --
> including synchronizing a mailbox to an empty (yet) spool.
> You'll need to do a bit of shell scripting which would spin around
> calling `doveadm user *` and feeding its output to something like
> 
>   while read user; do \
>     dest="/var/backup/dovecot/$user";
>     mkdir -p "$dest" && chown vmail:vmail "$dest" \
>       && chmod 0755 "$dest"
>     dsync -u "$user" backup "maildir:$dest" \
>   done
> 
> Note that you will only need this if you don't want to shut down
> Dovecot to copy its mail spool out.

You can also use doveadm backup -A maildir:%u/

Aki