On Thu, 20 Oct 2016 16:57:45 +0300 (EEST) Aki Tuomi <aki.tu...@dovecot.fi> wrote:
[...] > > Alternatively you can use `dsync` to perform backup with a native > > Dovecot tool. It's able to sync mailboxes of any Dovecot user -- > > including synchronizing a mailbox to an empty (yet) spool. > > You'll need to do a bit of shell scripting which would spin around > > calling `doveadm user *` and feeding its output to something like > > > > while read user; do \ > > dest="/var/backup/dovecot/$user"; > > mkdir -p "$dest" && chown vmail:vmail "$dest" \ > > && chmod 0755 "$dest" > > dsync -u "$user" backup "maildir:$dest" \ > > done > > > > Note that you will only need this if you don't want to shut down > > Dovecot to copy its mail spool out. > > You can also use doveadm backup -A maildir:%u/ Could you please elaborate? I have a typical "virtual users" setup where I do have mail_home = /var/local/mail/%Ln mail_location = maildir:~/mail and everything is stored with uid=vmail / gid=vmail (much like described in the wiki, that is). I'd like to use a single call to `doveadm backup -A ...` to back up the whole /var/local/mail/* to another location (say, /var/backups/dovecot/) so that is has the same structure, just synchronized with the spool. (The purpose is to then backup the replica off-site). I tried to call doveadm backup -A maildir:/var/backups/dovecot/%u and it created a directory "/var/backups/dovecot/%u" (with literal "%u", that is), created what appeared to be a single mailbox structure under it and after a while scared a heck out of me with a series of error messages reading dsync(user1): Error: Mailbox INBOX sync: mailbox_delete failed: INBOX can't be deleted. dsync(user2): Error: Mailbox INBOX sync: mailbox_delete failed: INBOX can't be deleted. ... for each existing user. It appears that it luckily failed to delete anything in the source directory (though I have no idea what it actually tried to do). Reading the doveadm-backup(1) multiple times still failed to shed a light for me on how to actually backup the whole maildir hierarchy for all existing users. So, the question: how do I really should go about backing up the whole mailbox hierarchy in the case of virtual users?
