Backup of dovecot

Submitted by sfatula on Mon, 10/10/2011 - 15:10

So, you page here:

http://www.virtualmin.com/documentation/email/troubleshooting

Shows how you can (wisely IMHO) change the location of the index and control files for dovecot. One thing is missing though..... If you do that, the control files are not backed up in any virtual machine backup. This is very bad, as, when a user restores from his backup, the control files are missing, emails get re-downloaded, and all sorts of bad things happen.

This can be fixed in Virtualmin one of two ways - either check the dovecot settings and follow them for backups, or, allow the root user to configure additional directories to include in virtual server backups so that they are complete. The second choice allows many other useful directories to be included in backups where you might have moved something. However, this would only work if you can limit those additional directories to only files the user has access to since in the case of moving dovecot index and control files, the new directory includes all server users.

Backup is really limited in this respect, and, it would be nice to be able to configure a backup that truly reflects a given virtual servers files (it says full!).

Status: 
Closed (fixed)

Comments

Submitted by JamieCameron on Thu, 10/13/2011 - 00:04

Are you sure the control files are really needed to be included in Dovecot backups? My understanding is that IMAP and POP3 clients use a message ID to determine which messages they have already fetched, which is derived from the message contents / headers.

Submitted by sfatula on Thu, 10/13/2011 - 09:30

As you might imagine, I was asking because it happened. Another customer of ours. When we looked into it, this is what we found.

Here is your reference:

http://wiki.dovecot.org/MailLocation/Maildir

Scroll down to the section talking about control files and read. The key part is how messages get new UIds, which in turn causes the client problems.

Submitted by JamieCameron on Thu, 10/13/2011 - 13:48

Thanks .. I will look into including these in backups in the next release.

Submitted by sfatula on Thu, 10/13/2011 - 13:51

Ok, just remember the files go into SOME directory. Perhaps, example, /var/dovecot. So, ALL users in ALL servers end up with control directories they own there. So, it's not as easy as storing everything in that dir, you have to only store files owned by that virtual server. Unless you have a better way.

You can ignore the index files I suppose since they are rebuilt.

Submitted by JamieCameron on Wed, 11/30/2011 - 00:04

This has been implemented for inclusion in the upcoming Virtualmin 3.89 release..

Submitted by Issues on Wed, 12/14/2011 - 00:46

Automatically closed -- issue fixed for 2 weeks with no activity.