[wellylug] Backing up maildirs

[Richard Hector]

On Sun, Aug 24, 2003 at 09:08:43PM +1200, Ewen McNeill wrote:
> 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.  [...]
> So rsync should be safe after all.

OK.

> 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.

Though it still seems useful to keep the creation times of the messages in
the Maildir (ie the delivery time), which the conversion to mbox would
presumably lose. Or does mbox format save the info somewhere else that could
be recovered?

Richard