Okay, I have a machine running the ancient SME 7.6, and want to migrate my mails over to SME 9.0, and I'm (trying to) make a backup of my mails to a thumbdrive on the existing machine. I set the backup to point to the thumbdrive, and set the machine to do scheduled backups, but subsequently when I go to Verify workstation backup, it tells me There is no backup set on configured workstation shared folder. Verify your configuration settings. When I go to Configure workstation backup, it shows I still have the thumbdrive set, and still shows the scheduled time, and I can even change the scheduled time for the backup. On Configure Workstation Backup pane, I see:
This panel displays the present workstation backup configuration. You can change it in this panel and the next one.
Backup is Enabled.
Backup is made on local USB disk
Destination backup share folder is media/NO_NAME
Number of rotating backup sets is 1
Number of daily backups contained in each set is 1
Compression level (0-9) of backup is 6
Daily backup occurs at 6:00
Each daily backup session is cleanly timed out after 8 hours.
Full backup sessions (new backup set) are allowed everyday
I'm not completely sure if the machine is just telling me it has it configured, but isn't actually doing the daily backups, or if the verify function is simply confused, and the machine is doing the daily backups. Also, is it normal for it to call the thumbdrive NO_NAME? (The only other selectable device was the CD rom drive.) The thumbdrive is a 128gig capacity made by SanDisk. (Could the machine be getting tripped up because its such a large-capacity thumbdrive?)
In any event, the old server is getting flaky, and periodically it stops responding to the email program, and sometimes stops collecting new emails from my webspace provider, and I have to send it a Reboot or maybe a Reconfigure, and it often shows lots of disk activity for no apparent reason, even when not responding to the email program and is in one of its periods of not collecting new mails. Its possible the hard drive is ready to fail.
I mainly want to get the mail backed up and then set up a new machine, but I don't know if I need to go through SME 8 before moving to SME 9, or if I can skip 8 and import my SME 7.6 mail backup directly to 9. But I also need to find out if the 7.6 machine is actually backing my mails up, I thought about detaching the thumbdrive and plugging it into my Windows 10 machine to see if there are files on it, but when I mentioned it on a chatroom I'm in, someone there said I should NEVER attach a drive with (backup?) files from a Linux machine onto a Windows machine unless I want to lose those files or see them get corrupted. Bearing in mind, this thumbdrive is still set to the original formatting it arrived with, all I did was take it out of the blister-pack and plug it into the SME server machine's USB port, and then set SME to point to that drive for the backups. Someone else I mentioned this to, who's worked with Linux alongside Windows, was telling me I shouldn't worry about Linux-saved files on the thumbdrive getting damaged by Windows, and that he's got a dual boot machine with Windows and Linux drives on it, and has accessed the Linux files from Windows without incident all the time, but I still wonder.
Anyway, I guess the main questions I have here are:
How do I make sure I'm successfully backing up my email to the thumbdrive?
Can I restore 7.6 email backups (and the included, multiple mailbox settings and credentials) straight onto an SME 9 box, or do I need to go through SME 8 first?
If I can't install 7.6 backups straight to SME 9, can I install SME 8 onto the existing SME 7.6 box and it retain the old email boxes, and their settings and credentials, and then I do a mail backup from that to a thumbdrive, before migrating THOSE over to an SME 9 box?