backup without stopping the imap server?

[Jared Watkins]

Andreas Hasenack wrote:

>On Mon, Jun 13, 2005 at 12:35:25PM -0400, Jared Watkins wrote:
>  
>
>>AFAIK the only really important data that can't be easily replaced is
>>the mailbox list database.  So I do regular dumps of that file and keep
>>    
>>
>
>What exactly is this? Really just the names of all the folders and
>user.USER mailboxes? Can't this be reconstructed by just inspecting the
>/var/spool/imap directory hierarchy where all mailboxes reside? What is
>the black magic here that prevents this from being reconstructed?
>  
>
It depends... if your setup is simple enough.. yes you could write a 
script to scan your folders and rewrite the text dump format of this 
file.  It also contains what imap partition the folder is on.. the 
owner.. and all permissions on the folder.  If you use a lot of shared 
mailboxes.. there is no other way to recover the permissions info that I 
know of.  Yes you could get by without it.. maybe.. but notice I didn't 
say it was impossible to rebuild this data.. only that it wasn't easily 
replaced.

Jared
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