replication newbie: some beginner questions

[Stefan G. Weichinger]

At a customer we run dovecot-2.3.10 along with postfix and mariadb,
using postfixadmin as GUI.

Now I plan to migrate to a new hardware (bigger machine) and in the same
step to migrate from Gentoo Linux to Debian Linux.

So I think about how to get the mailboxes from A to B.

We use one UID afaik:

mail_home = /home/vmail/%d/%u
mail_location = maildir:~

I read about dsync and wonder:

* does it make sense in this case to set up replication and let the
servers replicate at first while still running on the old server?

* do I have advantages over doing some rsync-jobs?

* I somewhere read about not being able to sync sieve-scripts below the
maildirs?

We have:

plugin {
  sieve = /home/vmail/%d/%u/sieve/.dovecot.sieve
  sieve_before = /etc/dovecot/sieve/global/default.sieve
  sieve_dir = /home/vmail/%d/%u/sieve/scripts/
  sieve_extensions = +imapflags
}

* would the replication sync over all the existing mails/mailboxes or
only the ones created *after* starting the replication? Stupid question
maybe, but I just want to be sure before I screw up the installation.

- sure, backups backups all the way

;-)

thanks for any feedback on this!

Stefan