I see the question as, "How do I freeze IMAP so it
doesn't change anything?"
That's usually the backup issue, how to get the file system
to hold still while you back it up. OSF1 advfs has a "clone"
operation for this purpose, I do not know if other file systems
offer similar functionality, of declaring an instant freeze
and then tracking changed pages so that life can go on and the
backup taken at the moment of the cloning.
Without such a facility, you need to shut off whatever causes
changes when the backup happens, or resign yourself to failing
the consistency-check pass of your backup method.
Shutting off mail delivery and imap access (by killing qmail-send
and doing whatever it takes to shut off imap service) during
a scheduled, planned, outage-for-backups time is one way to do it
With plenty of disk space, another possible solution would be to
use tar to take a momentary snapshot, such as it is, of your
user's situations, and then back up all the username.tar files,
which will not be dynamicly changing. That way you don't actually
back up (with consistency check) your dynamic user spaces, you back up
(to tape) the copies of them.
Dave Sill wrote:
>
> "Dennis" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
>
> >Yes, I'm asking the question again...
>
> Why? If you didn't like the first answers, you should say why.
>
> >Is there a formal way of backing up IMAP Maildir's ?
>
> There's nothing magic about maildirs. Your normal backup utilities
> (tar, dump, etc.) will handle them prefectly well.
>
> -Dave
--
David Nicol 816.235.1187 [EMAIL PROTECTED]
"I must report that I am in the fortunate position of having logged
and categorized my nightmares over the past 37 years."
-- Bob Dehnhardt
