service imap pid nnn in BUSY state: terminated abnormally

[Patrick Goetz]

On 10/9/2010 7:23 AM, Michael D. Sofka wrote:
>
> I can either rsync just the mail messages to the warm backup, and then reconstruct the index files. Or, I can take a slight detour, and upgrade the warm backup server to 2.3.16.
>

This is something I've been wondering, too.  The problem with not 
copying the indexes is that presumably you lose all the metadata.  And 
if you rsync /var/spool/cyrus/mail it would seem to me that you run the 
risk of the index being out of sync with the mail spool; i.e. the only 
way to safely use rsync is

    stop cyrus
    rsync
    restart cyrus

Which isn't practical for some environments.

imapsync seems to work fairly well and doesn't suffer from any race 
conditions like this, however requires that you have each user's imap 
password.  The solution that I'm considering is creating a dummy user 
called "mail-backup" or something like this and giving this user write 
permission on every mail account.  This way a single user could back up 
all the imap user folders on the server.