consequences of migrating to maildir storage system

[Troy Settle]

> -----Original Message-----
> From: Eric W. Bates
> Sent: Thursday, October 16, 2003 9:35 AM
> 
> Anyone have unfortunate experiences as a consequence of 
> converting mail storage from flat file (mbox) to maildir? I'm 
> concerned that the increase in the number of files might 
> cause problems with replication (we use rsync), backup or 
> even just running out of inodes.
> 
> Thanks.
> 
> Eric W. Bates
> ericx at vineyard.net
> 

I've never done a conversion, but having used both mbox and Maildir/ for
medium-sized systems (4-5k accounts), I can say that Maildir/ is
definitely the way to go.  Don't worry about inodes, just don't use the
defaults to newfs when building the filesystem.  I didn't intend to go
quite so high, but I ended up with over 90 million inodes on a 91GB
filesystem.  Currently, with ~4600 accounts:

  Filesystem    Size   Used  Avail Capacity iused    ifree %iused
Mounted on
  /dev/da1s1e    91G   5.7G    78G     7%  337904 95163918    0%   /var2

I know that some believe that replicating/backing up a mailstore is good
practice, but having suffered a lost system once, I found that it's not
worth the hassle, as the mail lost wasn't backed up since the early
morning hours, and the mail that was restored was already received by
the users.  Learning from this, I now use RAID5 (a simple mirror would
work as well) to keep my mail, backing up configuration and passwd files
only.

HTH,

--
  Troy Settle
  Pulaski Networks
  http://www.psknet.com
  540.994.4254 ~ 866.477.5638
  Pulaski Chamber 2002 Small Business Of The Year