Topic: Simple mail archiving

[david000]

Hi all,

If you have a moment -

I've SME10 install with 5 users and say 70GB of disk usage, 60Gb of that in a single user. I run 3 generations of backup which ends up on a NAS drive. That in turn is backed up to a rotating set of USB drives on a weekly basis. Belt and braces but it size of the backup is about to overwhelm my USB drives.

The mail goes back 10 years.  My question is, is their a simple way of archiving off mail before say 2016 in a way I can still get to it if needed ? 

I've seen it suggested that ThunderBird could offer a solution by backing up\moving mail to my local machine ?

Any thoughts appreciated.

David.




 

[Jean-Philippe Pialasse]

if you use an ext filesystem and rsync you should ba able yo then reduce the size of the backup by using a software that make hardlink of duplicate files.

backuppc does that and reduce size of incremental backups a lot. but does not support rotating backup disks.


for the initial question search on this forum about imap and backup or transfer.  you will see plenty of options.
my dumbest one is to simply use find with the date you want. However this assume the creation date is the actual one and files have not been copied with a new date
modification date can not be trusted as imap might alter this date  ehrn adding flags.
You can also move yourself old content using your imap client to a specific imap folder and then move this outside of Maildir. That is another way i personally use when user amount is equal to one.
you can also use the archive feature of thunderbird and then move the content of this imap folder latter.

[david000]

my dumbest one is to simply use find with the date you want. However this assume the creation date is the actual one and files have not been copied with a new date
modification date can not be trusted as imap might alter this date  ehrn adding flags.
You can also move yourself old content using your imap client to a specific imap folder and then move this outside of Maildir. That is another way i personally use when user amount is equal to one.
you can also use the archive feature of thunderbird and then move the content of this imap folder latter.

Thanks Jean-Philippe. Looks like Thunderbird could be a solution then. I'll take a look.