> On October 20, 2016 at 4:45 PM Konstantin Khomoutov > <flatw...@users.sourceforge.net> wrote: > > > On Thu, 20 Oct 2016 09:18:12 -0400 > Jerry <je...@seibercom.net> wrote: > > > I am running Dovecot with Postfix on a FreeBSD machine. There are > > problems with the drive and I cannot depend on it. Dovecot saves all > > mail in IMAP format. I want to back up the mail folders, install a new > > HD, install the latest FreeBSD OS and then reinstall my programs. > > Reinstalling Dovecot is simple, but how do I reinstall the IMAP > > folders? Can Dovecot backup the folders onto a CD and then import them > > when I reinstall it? My mail is kept under “/var/mail/vmail”. Should I > > just back up that entire directory structure and then restore it > > later? > > That should work (just make sure Dovecot is not running to not have a > race between your backup software and the IMAP server and clients). > > Alternatively you can use `dsync` to perform backup with a native > Dovecot tool. It's able to sync mailboxes of any Dovecot user -- > including synchronizing a mailbox to an empty (yet) spool. > You'll need to do a bit of shell scripting which would spin around > calling `doveadm user *` and feeding its output to something like > > while read user; do \ > dest="/var/backup/dovecot/$user"; > mkdir -p "$dest" && chown vmail:vmail "$dest" \ > && chmod 0755 "$dest" > dsync -u "$user" backup "maildir:$dest" \ > done > > Note that you will only need this if you don't want to shut down > Dovecot to copy its mail spool out.
You can also use doveadm backup -A maildir:%u/ Aki
