We will be deploying a replacement Dovecot server soon, and we are
planning to use maildir for the primary storage, but with an archive
namespace using mdbox (or perhaps sdbox), and SIS.
Our backup servers and (luke)warm spare server need to obtain full
copies of the mail store. For the maildirs I know I can simply use rsync
(we already use it here).
I'm a little wary of using rsync with mdbox and SIS though.
Obviously we would have to use the -H option of rsync to avoid
duplicating the hard linked data, does anybody have any experience with
how this scales? I've considered simply rsyncing the
/var/mail/dovecot/attach/??/??/hashes folders. Is there a tool that can
reconstruct the /var/mail/dovecot/attach/??/??/*-* links for a list of
messages in that case?
I'm aware of "doveadm backup", and (although it currently throws
up a
few errors) it seems like it might be a valid solution for our warm
spare server. Our backup servers, on the other hand, aren't supposed to
be visible to the production machines, with the exception of the backup
machine sshing in to do an rsync each night. We can't install dovecot on
them.
To perform partial email recovery in maildir, we can simply log into a
backup server, grep for emails of interest, and then scp them into a
maildir new/ subfolder on the mail server to recover them.
What about using dbox? I can identify
/var/mail/dovecot/archive/ash/dbox/storage/m.* files, and identify
necessary attachments under /var/mail/dovecot/attach/??/??/ but once
I've copied them over to the mail server is there a safe way to import
them? Actually, converting to a maildir style file would be adequate if
there is a script anywhere to do this. We'd still rather be backing up
the deduplicated mailstore for obvious reasons.
Has anybody got any suggestions?
I'm aware of "dsync backup questions" (
https://www.dovecot.org/list/dovecot/2013-February/088070.html ) but
there didn't really seem to be a solution.
Thanks,
Ash
PS Our current server has 257 users (though perhaps 100 are active),
using around 225G in total.
PPS? Proposed new server configuration:
mail_location = maildir:~/Maildir:LAYOUT=fs
mail_attachment_dir = /var/mail/dovecot/attach
mail_attachment_fs = sis posix
mail_attachment_hash = %{sha1}
mail_attachment_min_size = 128 k
namespace _archive {
list = yes
location = mdbox:/var/mail/dovecot/archive/%n/dbox
? prefix = Archive/
? separator = /
? subscriptions = yes
? type = private
}
namespace _private {
inbox = yes
type = private
separator = /
subscriptions = yes
prefix }
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