[wellylug] Backing up maildirs

Ewen McNeill wellylug at ewen.mcneill.gen.nz
Sun Aug 24 21:08:43 NZST 2003


In message <20030824085758.GC15558 at fake>, Richard Hector writes:
>> If by "maildirs" you mean the qmail, etc, style one-file-per-message
>> directories, then beware that at least some programs assume that the file
>> name is (in part anyway) made up from the _inode_ number.  
>
>Ouch. That sounds ugly. [...]
>I'll look into it, but do you have a reference?

It appears I am misremembering.  The qmail FAQs I've found which
mention inodes and a similar restriction are talking about the mail
_queue_ rather than the mail directory.  (The technique is used for
efficiency of getting a "guarenteed safe" filename to use.)

mbox and MH (messages numbered sequentially, 1 ... N) are definitely
fine.  As far as I can see from the maildir(5) manpages (from qmail)
that I can find on the net, the maildir (ie, mail directory) format is
actually time.pid.host, and hence doesn't rely on the inode.

So rsync should be safe after all.

It may still be simply to create mbox files and export out of them again
though; mbox files should transfer quicker as there won't be multiple
per-file overheads.

Ewen



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