[Discuss] Backup E-mail Server?

[dsr at randomstring.org (Dan Ritter)]

Kent Borg wrote: 
> In a few days, if this server is still running nicely, I plan to order a
> completely new set of hardware and set configure it. The question is how?
> 
> I see three general options:
> 
> 2. As before, but with the extra safety of each server having a secondary
> set of users, and have each server automatically rsync Maildirs to the
> other's secondary users. (Or actually mail to the other backup user.)
> Advantage: The backup, once it is working, isn't likely to have one server
> kill the other, still pretty simple design.

If you run dovecot as your imap server, dovesync does case 2
easily and efficiently -- keeping the maildirs in sync.

The downside is that you *must* access your maildirs via imap
after that, even when you are logged in to the mail server.
Deleting or moving messages must happen through dovecot, or
dovesync will helpfully fix your problems.

-dsr-