----- Original Message ----- From: <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> To: <[email protected]> Sent: Thursday, August 01, 2002 8:49 PM Subject: Re: Maildirs in Debian
> Hello! > > On Fri, Aug 02, 2002 at 09:06:07AM +1000, Jeff Waugh wrote: > ... > > There are plenty of reasons to not use Maildir, too. > ... > On Fri, Aug 02, 2002 at 09:26:29AM +1000, Jeff Waugh wrote: > ... > > No. I use maildirs on my IMAP server and mboxes on my desktop because they > > are appropriate to each. They operate very differently, and have pros/cons > > for different uses. > ... > > Please elaborate on the disadvanteges of having Maildir as system > mailbox. > > Regards, > > Jorge-Le�n One advantage of maildir vs mbox formats comes with doing incremental backups to tape with tar. With mbox, the whole file will get backed up with every incremental backup if it is changed. If you have clients using IMAP or don't check their email often, you wind up with lots of big files. With spam and viruses arriving all the time, most mailboxes are getting changed daily. In my experience, incremental backups on mbox files do not save much space. For instance, I have about 12Gb worth of mailboxes, and an incremental backup using tar of only files modified within the last day, is usually about 11Gb. With maildir, I would imagine that an incremental backup would be much easier, as you'd only have to backup the last few messages that have arrived, though I haven't actually tried it. Comments from anyone who If you wanted to do efficient backups of mbox format messages, I suppose that rsync to another drive or system would probably be best. Sincerely, -- Kirk Ismay System Administrator
