Backing up and restoring maildir folders

[Timothy D Legg]

Hello,

I am migrating to a different distribution of  Linux that involves
changing to an earlier version of dovecot (2.2.22 to 2.2.13).  As part of
this process, I will be copying several maildirs to the new machine.  One
of these has a number of files and directories that resemble this one
example:

cur/
dovecot.index
dovecot.index.cache
dovecot.index.log
dovecot.mailbox.log
dovecot-uidlist
dovecot-uidvalidity
dovecot-uidvalidity.59206030
.Drafts/
new/
.Sent/
subscriptions
tmp/
.Trash/

Is it good enough to simply stop dovecot and tar this folder, and others
like it, and copy them back to a similar location on the new installation?
 I haven't yet seen anything that resembles an official or standardized
backup/recovery method for dovecot.

With thanks and appreciation,

Tim Legg