In the end, what I did was use WinRAR on a local workstation to extract and merge together the four partial backups I had. This resulted in capturing about 99% of the email. Then, due to the change in IMAP folder delimiters from ";" to ".", I used a freeware program called RenameMaster to replace all instances of ; with . in my user's folders. Once this was complete, I copied all data to an ibay and finally moved to the correct location on the 7.3 server (since updated to 7.4). After that, all I needed to do was remove the subscriptions file from the Maildir and use chown -R to correctly set the permissions for each user's files.
Since my last backup set was 11/23 and the new hardware wasn't prepared until 11/25, I used Thunderbird to search for any emails dated after 11/23 and manually copied them from the old accounts to the new accounts as they were set up on the desktop. This process took about 5 - 10 minutes per account.
So far everything seems to be working well, though I am still looking to fill some of the gaps I have due to 6.x contribs not being available for 7.x (most notably the mailblocking contrib).
Yes, this was a pain in the.... but it worked and took less than a day for 60 users and 12+ GB of email.
16 Replies
24291 Views