best practices for migrating to new dovecot version

[Aki Tuomi]

Hi,


> On 17 July 2018 at 22:01 Shawn Heisey <elyograg at elyograg.org> wrote:
> 
> 
> I have a machine with my mail service on it running Debian Squeeze.  The
> version of dovecot on that server is 1.2.15.
> 
> I'm building a new server with Ubuntu 18.04 (started with 16.04,
> upgraded in place), where the dovecot version is 2.2.33.  I plan to
> migrate all my services to this new machine.
> 
> The virtual mailboxes are on disk in maildir format, with accounts in a
> mysql database managed by postfixadmin.  When I copy them over to the
> new machine, would there be any value to excluding the files that
> dovecot creates, and letting the new version recreate them?  In one
> mailbox here are some of the files I am considering excluding:
> 

you can probably ignore these.

> dovecot.index
> dovecot.index.cache
> dovecot.index.log
> dovecot.index.thread

do not ignore these

> dovecot-keywords
> dovecot-uidlist
> dovecot-uidvalidity
> dovecot-uidvalidity.5876ca77
> 



> There are other files under consideration, like maildirsize and
> maildirfolder.  One that I would be sure to *not* remove is subscriptions.
> 
> If there are recommendations about dovecot files in a maildir that
> should not be removed during a migration, please let me know.
> 
> I'm aware that rebuilding this information could be slow.  My own
> personal mailbox on the system is over 8GB in size and has well over
> nine hundred thousand files in it.
> 

You can just rsync everything over to new system.

> Thanks,
> Shawn