[KLUG Members] Migrating Cyrus

[Joe Baker]

Adam Tauno Williams <adam at morrison-ind.com>  Wrote:

>>     > > What is the correct way to migrate Cyrus imap to a new server?
>>     > > My old box is running Suse 9.0 and the new box is Suse 10.0.
>>           
>     > I would guess that you could simply copy the user's maildir over to the
>     > new server.
>         

    This won't work; Cyrus doesn't use maildir.  You need the message
    databases in order for the Cyrus daemons to start.  Although you might
    be able to just use reconstruct to rebuild the databases you'd probably
    loose allot of information (such as seen-state).

      

>     > Another tool that I've found useful for such migrations is imapsync
>     > which copies messages and folders from one server to the new server.
>         

    Does it copy over meta-data such as seen-state?

    I tried imapsync once but that was almost five years ago; it worked
    pretty badly then.

Yes, impasync copies over the metadata, acls, seen-state, etc...


Imapsync is a no-brainier if you can run it once over the weekend and move all the data over at one time.  Users who delete messages during the migration period may find they need to re-delete some of those messages on the new server.

I'm sure there must be a cleaner way to migrate the raw cyrus data.  I am under the impression that Cyrus does use IMAP but that additionally it develops databases which aid in the performance of metadata searches.

It's been described to me that Tuffmail for instance nightly batches indexing jobs where they take in all the new messages from the day for each account.  But that when a client asks to sort on date, subject, size etc that most of the sorting takes place in the database, then it works through the unsorted messages from the maildir manually.

Good luck on your migration!   I've dabbled with Mandriva's integration of the Kolab project which includes Cyrus Imap but I havn't put it into production anywhere.

-Joe Baker
 Burlington, Wisconsin


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