Recommend how to move 31GB of mail to a new server

[Patrick Boutilier]

Ulrich Spoerlein wrote:
> On Sat, 23.06.2007 at 22:34:33 -0300, Patrick Boutilier wrote:
>> Daniel O'Connor wrote:
>>> On Sunday 24 June 2007 07:37, Gary Mills wrote:
>>>> For only 30 gigabytes, you might be better off just copying the files
>>>> over, with IMAP down.  It could only take a few hours.  You can copy
>>>> a sample from the live system to get an idea of the timing.
>>> You could rsync the mail spool while it is live, take it down and then 
>>> rsync again.
>>>
>>> That should save considerable time as I would imagine the vast majority 
>>> of email would be unchanged between the first & second copy.
>> But unfortunately rsync will still have to scan each file to determine 
>> what has changed, and that can chew up a lot of time.
> 
> Better than to speculate is to measure.
> Time the rsync of the mailboxes to your new server. *Don't* shutdown
> cyrus, but rsync right again. Measure the second run, too. This will
> roughly be your expected downtime. I would be surprised if it is more
> than 5-10 minutes.

Depends on how many files are on the filesystem. I have done this kind 
of move before and to speed things up I did a seperate rsync for each of 
the letters (A-W) in the mail partition.

> 
> You could also do: rsync (long time), rsync (short time), shutdown
> cyrus, rsync (even shorter time).
> 
> hth
> Ulrich Spoerlein