backup v rsync

[George Papas]

Sorry for late reply  imapsync is a great tool  for migrating accounts


On 5/22/21 11:28 PM, Jeff Abrahamson wrote:
> I've been migrating from a dovecot 2.2.22 instance to a dovecot 
> 2.3.7.2 instance.
> (Said differently, from an ubuntu 16.04 host to a 20.04 host.) It's a 
> tiny site:
> only a handful of users actually had to migrate, most either died on 
> the old one
> or were born on the new one.  The main user in need of migration was me.
>
> After fiddling with dsync and not getting it working, I threw in the 
> towel.  This
> is a migration I had to do once for precisely one user.  I had been 
> using the old
> host exclusively, so it was easy to shut down both dovecot instances 
> the time it
> took me to rsync my data from one to the other.  Now that seems to 
> work, almost.
> Mail is being delivered to my inbox, anyway.  Most other folders are 
> looking
> inaccessible to my mail client (thunderbird, for this test).
>
> The main difference between the two servers, aside from the above, is 
> a switch from
>
>     mail_location = maildir:~/Maildir
>
> to
>
>     mail_home = /var/mail/vmail/%d/%n
>     mail_location = maildir:/var/mail/vmail/%d/%n/mail:LAYOUT=fs
>     mail_privileged_group = mail
>
> I corrected permissions and ownership when I copied the data.
>
> Now I think the problem is that LAYOUT=fs means that I should have a 
> slightly different
> folder hierarchy now.  The question is how best to fix this.
>
> I have things like this
>
>     .Archives.2020
>     .Archives.2020/new
>     .Archives.2020/tmp
>     .Archives.2020/cur
>
> when I think I should have things like this
>
>     Archives
>     Archives/2021
>     Archives/2021/new
>     Archives/2021/tmp
>     Archives/2021/cur
>
> And, again, this is one-off, so a manual fix seems most appropriate.  
> I'm quite tempted
> simply to shut down the dovecot instance for a minute at a quiet 
> moment (mail retries...)
> and rename directories as indicated above.  I only have to rename five 
> directories.
>
> Having gotten myself in a bit of a muddle on this, I thought perhaps a 
> reality check that
> I'm not about to make it worse would be appropriate.
>
> Many thanks.
>