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<p>We will be deploying a replacement Dovecot server soon, and we
are planning to use maildir for the primary storage, but with an
archive namespace using mdbox (or perhaps sdbox), and SIS.</p>
<p>Our backup servers and (luke)warm spare server need to obtain
full copies of the mail store. For the maildirs I know I can
simply use rsync (we already use it here).<br>
</p>
<p>I'm a little wary of using rsync with mdbox and SIS though.</p>
<p>Obviously we would have to use the -H option of rsync to avoid
duplicating the hard linked data, does anybody have any experience
with how this scales? I've considered simply rsyncing the
/var/mail/dovecot/attach/??/??/hashes folders. Is there a tool
that can reconstruct the /var/mail/dovecot/attach/??/??/*-* links
for a list of messages in that case?</p>
<p>I'm aware of "doveadm backup", and (although it currently throws
up a few errors) it seems like it might be a valid solution for
our warm spare server. Our backup servers, on the other hand,
aren't supposed to be visible to the production machines, with the
exception of the backup machine sshing in to do an rsync each
night. We can't install dovecot on them.</p>
<p>To perform partial email recovery in maildir, we can simply log
into a backup server, grep for emails of interest, and then scp
them into a maildir new/ subfolder on the mail server to recover
them.</p>
<p>What about using dbox? I can identify
/var/mail/dovecot/archive/ash/dbox/storage/m.* files, and identify
necessary attachments under /var/mail/dovecot/attach/??/??/ but
once I've copied them over to the mail server is there a safe way
to import them? Actually, converting to a maildir style file would
be adequate if there is a script anywhere to do this. We'd still
rather be backing up the deduplicated mailstore for obvious
reasons.<br>
</p>
<p>Has anybody got any suggestions?</p>
<p>I'm aware of "dsync backup questions" (
<a class="moz-txt-link-freetext" href="https://www.dovecot.org/list/dovecot/2013-February/088070.html">https://www.dovecot.org/list/dovecot/2013-February/088070.html</a> )
but there didn't really seem to be a solution.<br>
</p>
<p>Thanks,<br>
</p>
<p>Ash</p>
<p>PS Our current server has 257 users (though perhaps 100 are
active), using around 225G in total.<br>
</p>
<p>PPS Proposed new server configuration:<br>
</p>
<pre>mail_location = maildir:~/Maildir:LAYOUT=fs
mail_attachment_dir = /var/mail/dovecot/attach
mail_attachment_fs = sis posix
mail_attachment_hash = %{sha1}
mail_attachment_min_size = 128 k
namespace _archive {
list = yes
location = mdbox:/var/mail/dovecot/archive/%n/dbox
prefix = Archive/
separator = /
subscriptions = yes
type = private
}</pre>
<pre>namespace _private {
inbox = yes
type = private
separator = /
subscriptions = yes
prefix =
}</pre>
<p></p>
<pre>
</pre>
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