choosing a file system

[Andrew McNamara]

>Yeah, except Postfix encodes the inode of the queue files in its queue
>IDs, so it gets very confused if you do this.  Same with restoring
>queues from backups.

You should be able to get away with this if, when moving the queue to
another machine, you move the queued mail from hold, incoming, active and
deferred directories into the maildrop directory on the target instance.

This (somewhat old, but still correct, I think) message from Wietse
might shed more light on it:

    Date: Thu, 12 Sep 2002 20:33:08 -0400 (EDT)
    From: wietse at porcupine.org (Wietse Venema)
    Subject: Re: postfix migration

    > I want to migrate postfix to another machine. What are also the steps so 
    > that I won't lose mails on the process?

    This is the safe procedure.

    1) On the old machine, stop Postfix.

    2) On the old machine, run as super-user:

            postsuper -r ALL

       This moves all queue files to the maildrop queue.

    3) On the old machine, back up /var/spool/postfix/maildrop

    4) On the new machine, make sure Postfix works.

    5) On the new machine, stop Postfix.

    6) On the new machine, restore /var/spool/postfix/maildrop

    7) On the new machine, start Postfix.

    There are ways to skip the "postsuper -r ALL" step, and copy the
    incoming + active + deferred + bounce + defer + flush + hold
    directories to the new machine, but that would be safe only with
    an empty queue on the new machine.

-- 
Andrew McNamara, Senior Developer, Object Craft
http://www.object-craft.com.au/