Archiving .maildir folders

Vermyndax · Apprentice Joined: 13 Dec 2003 Posts: 208

I have Gentoo running .maildirs for my users with courier-imap3d and courier-pop3d.

For those users who use IMAP, is there any decent method/cron job/idea for archiving messages and gzipping them or do I have to rely on the users to do that?

davidblewett · Posted: Wed Apr 14, 2004 4:35 pm Post subject:

Since .maildir is basically a simple file per message structure, you could use traditial backup methods to accomplish this. I like rdiff-backup. It uses the rsync protocol, and is able to backup to a local drive or across SSH to a network location. It also provides differential backups, so that you can get a backup from a certain point in time. Highly useful, especially for e-mail I would think. Since it's basically a mirror of the .maildir, all you have to do to restore is either use rdiff-backup's --restore-as-of feature or simply copy the file back from the backup location.

If you want it compressed, you would have to do that yourself, as this program doesn't do that. I'd be careful with compressing everything together, as this can complicate restores.
_________________
No guilt in life, no fear in death
this is the power of Christ in me
From lifes first cry to final breath
Jesus commands my destiny
-- Newsboys, "In Christ Alone", "Adoration: The Worship Album"

Vermyndax · Apprentice Joined: 13 Dec 2003 Posts: 208

Well, I have partimage and have used it every now and then to run backups, but I was mainly interested in this because of users who love to "save and never delete." I would like to be able to take a certain set of messages after a time period, gzip them up and place them somewhere as a cron job.

I guess I could milk the program you mentioned to accomplish something like that... kinda like the autoarchive function of Outlook...

davidblewett · Posted: Wed Apr 14, 2004 7:11 pm Post subject:

If this is a production environment, wouldn't you want the archive to be as seamless as possible? If you gzip things, it will require some kludges to get it to be invisible to the user. With rdiff-backup, I think it would be much easier to write scripts to retrieve a specific message from the backup. Here is the homepage: http://rdiff-backup.stanford.edu
_________________
No guilt in life, no fear in death
this is the power of Christ in me
From lifes first cry to final breath
Jesus commands my destiny
-- Newsboys, "In Christ Alone", "Adoration: The Worship Album"

shadowlost · n00b Joined: 05 Apr 2004 Posts: 7 Location: Seattle, WA

then you can try this. Or a variant.
/var/spool/mail is a set of RAID-1 9-gig drives, xfs.
maildirs are used throughout and symlinked to ~/Maildir (Damn you djb)
Courier/exim, yadda yadda