mdbox vs. maildir format

[Doug]

On 10/18/2022 7:46 PM, Steve Litt wrote:
> On Tue, 2022-10-18 at 16:48 +0200, Bernardo Reino wrote:
>> On 18/10/2022 12:17, Michael wrote:
>>   >
>>   > [...]
>>> so, raid is mandatory, which is already the case, but what about backup?
>>> how can i achieve a backup/snapshot of both, the mdbox (nfs share) and
>>> the index files (local raid) and assure they are consistent?
>> You can use doveadm to backup the mailboxes, which should work correctly
>> even in a live system.
>>
>> My backup "strategy" (hopefully it deserves that name) is to weekly run
>> something like:
>>
>> for MAILBOX in $USERS; do
>>           doveadm expunge -u "$MAILBOX" mailbox Trash savedbefore 7d
>>           doveadm expunge -u "$MAILBOX" mailbox Spam savedbefore 30d
>>           doveadm purge -u "$MAILBOX"
>>
>>           LOCATION2="mdbox:/srv/snap_mail/$MAILBOX/mdbox"
>>           doveadm -v backup -u "$MAILBOX" -P "$LOCATION2"
>> done
> Do you think the preceding shellscript will work if I store my Dovecot messages in
> the Maildir form?
>
> Thanks,
>
> SteveT

Yes it will. The source format is your current format (maildir) and the 
target format is whatever you specify (mdbox: or maildir:)

I do something similar with my daily backups using dsync. Like others, I 
was hesitant about using mdbox in the beginning and my solution was to 
create my point in time backups in maildir format.

    for user in $users; do
         dsync -u ${user} backup maildir:/home/$user/.mailbkup/mailboxes
    done


This is a simplified version of my command. In my backup script this 
runs inside another loop to make backups for all users in parallel, but 
I only have about 20 users and plenty of excess CPU on my server. I run 
this about 4 times per day to sync changes to my backup copy. Once the 
initial sync is done the incremental changes run pretty quickly.

Doug
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