Importing/moving an older cyrus message tree into a new system, without IMAP

[Shuvam Misra]

Dear Dan,

> If you're not concerned about your quota database, seen state, annotations,
> and subscription information, and assuming you've already regenerated your
> top level mailbox hierarchy, then you should be able to copy over the
> individual email files from each mailbox to the new server and perform a
> reconstruct on each mailbox (with the -r recursive option).
> 
> If the new location is already live, then you'll need to be careful that
> you don't hit any filename collisions between the old server (e.g. email
> '123.') and the new server.
> 
> You may also be able to copy over the primary database files (like your
> <configdirectory>/mailboxes.db), if your library version and cyrus versions
> match between the old and new servers. If not, you may need to use
> cvt_cyrusdb to convert the database from the old server to flat or skiplist
> and convert them back to their native format on the new server (berkeley db
> version mismatches are particularly a problem here).

What other meta-data files other than mailboxes.db do I need to copy if
I want to restore everything (seen flags, other flags, etc)? And will it
be a generally good practice to convert all required database files to
"flat" first, then re-convert to the new server's file format? Will this
guarantee a trouble-free migration?

My aim is to be able to restore all meta-data in the event of a bare
metal crash recovery. I'm ok with running a reconstruct if needed,
but I should be able to re-create all meta-data, including mail folder
permissions (which I'll get from mailboxes.db, I think), flags, quota,
etc. I am trying to arrive at a "proper" process for recovery in the
event of slight mismatch between Cyrus versions or in the event of
moving between 32-bit and 64-bit hardware. One thing I'm not worried
about is how to back up the messages themselves --- a shutdown of Cyrus
and simple tar of the spool area will do for me, I think.

thanks and regards,
Shuvam