Hi,

I am contemplating about using/installing CyrusIMAP.

As much I do know, every mail is stored as a single file.
Does that mean, e.g. for backup-purposes that those
"mail-files" can simply be copied/saved to somewhere
and copied back to the orignal location in the case of
a "restore-scanario" or to a fresh installation of CyrusIMAP?


Any tip`s are appreciated very much. Thank`s

Bill

tools55@bluemail.ch wrote:
> Hi,
>
> I am contemplating about using/installing CyrusIMAP.
>
> As much I do know, every mail is stored as a single file.
> Does that mean, e.g. for backup-purposes that those
> "mail-files" can simply be copied/saved to somewhere
> and copied back to the orignal location in the case of
> a "restore-scanario" or to a fresh installation of CyrusIMAP?

Correct.

Cyrus has a 'reconstruct' command to recreate the coherence of
a mail folder/directory.

Individual message file names are their ordinal number followed
by a dot. As long as you don't lose the cyrus.* files that
reside in each and every Cyrus mailbox (folder), the filenames
will be allocated in strictly ascending order ; names associated
with deleted messages wil not be re-used.

Beware : from backing up one (or a few) files per user (in a
UWash IMAP or other one-file-per-mailbox server scenario) you
will be operating in a one-file-per-message environement, with
potentially huge numbers of files in your mailstore.
Conventional file system dumps will continue to perform well
(incremental dumps will only contain new messages and the
metadata files, no longer the entire mbox file) but restores
(crash recovery or user-error driven) will be ... challenging.

Eric.