On Sun, 9 Apr 2006, Bill Moran wrote:
"Marc G. Fournier" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
On Sat, 8 Apr 2006, Bill Moran wrote:
One advantage of Maildir over mbox and the Cyrus db (that, for some
reason, I seldom see touted) is that you can make a safe backup of a
Maildir without shutting down the SMTP, POP, or IMAP server. With both
mbox and the Cyrus mail system, you have to shut the mail system down to
back up the mail boxes.
Why with Cyrus IMAPd? I just had a major hardware failure, had to restore
30 mail spools from backup, all of which were 'backed up live', and the
only thing I had to do once restored was run the 'reconstruct' command to
make sure the various databases were sync'd up ... and the reconstruct
command can be run while the system is live too ...
I have only a small amount of experience with Cyrus. However:
http://cyrusimap.web.cmu.edu/twiki/bin/view/Cyrus/Backup
Based on that document, it appears as if you're dodging the bullet with
backups. My interpretation is that Cyrus keeps mailboxes in some sort
of db file. If a db file is being modified while you're backing it up,
the backed up version will be inconsistent, thus the entire mailbox
unusable.
Agreed, but this db file is stored within the maibox itself, and which is
what Cyrus has a 'reconstruct' command to rebuild ... so, after a restore,
the first thing you run in 'reconstruct' to make sure you database(s)
match the mailbox ...
Compare this to Maildir, where each message is a seperate file. If
you're backing up during access to a mailbox, a single message could end
up corrupt, but this will not affect the rest of the mailbox.
Oh, wait, I misunderstood your first paragraph ... Cyrus IMAP stores its
individual mail messages in a seperate file (old 'mh' kinda thing), but
there is a db file that maintains the 'state' informatin for the folder
(what messages have been read, marked deleted but not purged, etc) ...
----
Marc G. Fournier Hub.Org Networking Services (http://www.hub.org)
Email: [EMAIL PROTECTED] Yahoo!: yscrappy ICQ: 7615664
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