Move data to new harddisk (fs-type and options, config)

[Simon Matter]

> Hi,
> I am about to move my IMAP storage to a new harddisk (old HD gets too
> small
> and may fail in the near future).
> Cyrus  serves a small group of people (about 5), running on old hardware
> (PII,300) with a new 80GB IDE HD. No performance issues.
> I have several questions about details of the migration:
>
> 1. a) FS-type: any recommendations (I would have used reiserfs, but ext3
> or
> ext2 could be options as well)?

Okay, this lets us know that you are running Linux. I'm using XFS and ext3
and it seems that reiserfs also performs well with cyrus. I think you can
choose any of them, however not every FS is well integrated in any distro.

> b) FS options: should I use specials options when generating the FS (there
> may be a lot of files in folders as we all know), eg inodes,...

I don't think you have to care about that for a small 80G cyrus message
store. Of course that's something else in the multi Terabyte range...

> c) any mount-options I should use?
> FYI: the new harddisk will be mounted to /data and will have directories
> imap/part and imap/conf directories for the partition and configdir)

I'm usually using noatime for /var/spool/imap with ext3.

>
> 2. Which parts should I move:
> a) Of course I want to move the partition (partition-default, which ist
> /var/spool/imap currently)
> b) I would like to move configdirectory (/var/lib/imap) as well - is the
> recommendable?
>
> 3. How to do the migration
> I intended to
> - stop postfix and imapd
> - copy all files with "cp --preserve --recursive" to the new location (are
> there links to be taken care of)?

Yes, there may be hardlinks when using single instance store, "rsync -aH"
is better anyway.

> - change /etc/imapd.conf regarding the two settings (partition-default and
> configdirectory)

I don't suggest putting configdirectory and partition-default on the same
filesystem if you want to use noatime option.

> - start imapd and postfix again
> Will this work or is this not the preferred way to to it

This will work but why not simply move the data to filesystems on the new
disk and then mount them to the old locations?

Simon