Questions about backup files in /var/imap/db

[Daniel Qian]

John Alton Tamplin <jtampli at sph.emory.edu> said:

> Daniel Qian wrote:
> 
> >It confused me by putting all databases using BDB under a imap directory. 
> >
> Read the documentation at sleepycat -- the logs are per BDB 
> environment.  In this case, it protects only the various BDB files used 
> by Cyrus.
> 
> >Anyway I am more concerned about a proper way to backup all my mailbox 
> >messages. It seems to me that I can backup the content under these 
> >directories:
> >/var/imap ; where my mailboxes.db resides
> >/var/spool/imap/user ; suppose I only care about the messages already in 
user 
> >mailboxes
> >
> >So even on a newly installed empty system resulted from a system crash I 
> >would still be able to recover everything in mailboxes simply by copying 
back 
> >these backup files to where they are before the crash and run a 
reconstruct.
> >Correct me if I am missing anything.
> >
> Correct, although you might care about the BDB logs if the mailboxes.db 
> was corrupted due to the crash.  Personally I like dumping the mailbox 
> list to a text file just before the backup as a belt-and-suspenders 
> safety net.
> 
> -- 
> John A. Tamplin                               Unix System Administrator
> Emory University, School of Public Health     +1 404/727-9931
> 
> 
> 
> 

OK I will add an extra mailbox dump step to the daily backup scheme. But 
there is one point in it that I am not clear about: 
When I first laid my hands on Cyrus I deleted some mailbox folders I didn't 
want because these folder names were non-English ones created automatically 
by MS Outlook Express and I could not dm them in cyradm. So I figured I could 
ctl_mboxlist -d them to a text file and delete them there before I 
ctl_mboxlist -u them back into mailboxes.db. Everything worked fine until the 
next day I found the folders I deleted came back into the mailbox list again. 
I have no idea how they got back and where they were kept after I deleted the 
folders from both the file system and the mailbox list 


-- 
Best Regards,
Daniel Qian