mail backup solution?

[Mike Jeays]

On Mon, 2006-03-13 at 09:28 -0500, Chuck Swiger wrote:
> Pat Maddox wrote:
> > On 3/13/06, Chuck Swiger <cswiger at mac.com> wrote:
> [ ... ]
> >> The two most common styles of mailboxes are mbox and maildir, and both of those
> >> can be backed up at the filesystem level using dump, tar, or anything else.
> > 
> > I've got it set up using maildir.  In the past to back up the mail I
> > just copied the files.  At one point I had to restore from the backup,
> > so I just copied the files back into the original location.  Logging
> > in via imap though, there were no emails to be found.  I've gotten
> > vague "I think you just copy the files" responses, but that didn't
> > work in my case, and I'm not sure what I need to do.
> 
> Did you take a look at an actual mailbox file and confirm that it contained the
> messages you expected?
> 
> Did you restart the IMAP daemon after doing the restore?
> 

Using Evolution, I made a tar backup of the .evolution directory, and
copied it to another machine.  It came nowhere close to working
properly, and was about as annoying to work with as Outlook. It behaved
just like a proprietary product with mysterious file formats, even
though the mailbox files themselves seem to be clean mboxes.  It must
keep configuration data hidden somewhere else.  I am pretty well fed up
with the product, and may switch to Thunderbird.

Or have I failed to understand something?
-- 
Mike Jeays
http://ca.geocities.com/mike.jeays@rogers.com