On 24.1.2011, at 15.52, Javier de Miguel Rodrí guez wrote:

>    - One of the main advantages (speed wise) of dbox over maildir is that 
> index files are the only storage for message flags and keywords. What happens 
> when we want to recover some messages from backup? With maildir we can 
> rebuild message indexes, but I am not sure about dbox. Should we also restore 
> "old indexes" and  merge with the "new indexes" in order to restore the 
> deleted messages?

The intended way to restore stuff is to either restore the entire dbox to a 
temp directory, or at least all the important parts of it (indexes + the files 
that contain the wanted mails) and then use something like:

doveadm import sdbox:/tmp/restoredbox "" savedsince 2011-01-01

>    - The previous question applies to sdbox and mdbox. In the case of mdbox, 
> we can configure rotation of files using /mdbox_rotate_size/ . We would like 
> to rotate daily, not based in size (our users ask us for yesterday's backup). 
> How can we accomplish this?

mdbox_rotate_interval = 1d

But note that that doesn't guarantee that there will be only one file. Even if 
you set mdbox_rotate_size to 10 GB or something (or I think 0 makes it 
unlimited, not sure), it's possible that two files will be created if mails are 
being saved at the same time. mdbox never waits for locks when writing to a 
file, instead it'll just use another file or create a new one.

Anyway, if it's not a big deal restoring the user's entire mailbox temporarily 
you can restore only yesterday's mails by giving proper search query parameter 
to doveadm import.

>    We have now 17.000.000 messages in our maildir, almost 1.5 TB (zlib 
> compresssion enabled). Our backup time with bacula is rather bad: 24 hours 
> for a full backup, most of the time the backup is busy fstat'ing all those 
> little messages.

In case of Maildir there's no point in fstating any mail files. I'd guess it 
should be possible to patch bacula to not do that.

> We think that mdbox can help us in this. Does anybody has good experiences 
> migrating from maildir->mdox in "large" enviroments? What about mdox 
> performance & reliability?

I haven't recently heard of corruption complaints about mdbox.. Previously when 
there were those, I didn't hear of complains about losing mails or anything, so 
that's good :)

Reply via email to