On Mon, 2013-02-04 at 00:57 +0000, Ben Morrow wrote: > I can't give authoratitive answers to either of these, but... > > At 6PM -0500 on 3/02/13 you (Joe Beaubien) wrote: > > > > I'm currently trying to setup remote backups of my emails but i'm running > > into issues (mdbox format, indexes and storage in the same folder > > hierarchy). > > > > Local backup command: dsync -u "my_user" backup /backups/my_user > > > > (1) Recently, I noticed that the local backup takes up twice the size as > > the original mail location (8gb vs. 4gb). I purged alot of emails from the > > original location, so the size shrunk, but the local backup just keeps on > > getting bigger. I couldn't find any dsync option that would delete extra > > emails. > > > > - Question: Why isn't the local backup synced properly and remove the extra > > emails? > > Are you running 'doveadm purge' on the backed-up dbox? It looks to me as > though dsync doesn't do that. I don't know if there's any (simple) way > to do that without a running Dovecot instance attached the dbox > directory: it's not entirely clear to me whether doveadm will run > locally without contacting a doveadm-server instance running under > Dovecot, nor how to point 'doveadm purge' at an arbitrary directory.
Right. doveadm -o mail=mdbox:/backups/my_user purge > It might be easier to dsync to a Maildir instead. This should preserve > all the Dovecot-visible metadata, and dsyncing back to the dbox for > restore should put it all back. Better sdbox than maildir. > > (2) What is the best why to copy this local backup to a remote location > > that does NOT have the possibility to run dsync. > > > > - Question 1: is rsync safe to use and will this data work for restore? > > > > - Question 2: Would it be safe to simply rsync the original mail_location > > to the remote server? > > AFAICT, if Dovecot is stopped on both sides of the transfer it should be > safe. If either side has a currently running Dovecot instance (or any > other Dovecot tools, like a concurrent dsync) using that dbox, it's > likely rsync will copy an inconsistent snapshot of the data, and the > result will be corrupted. It won't be badly corrupted though. At worst Dovecot will rebuild the indexes, which takes a while. And most users probably won't get any corruption at all.
