[kdepim-users] dimap, where are mails stored locally and how to back up?

[Andras Mantia]

Dirk Sarpe wrote:

> I was afraid of this. Makes also the migration from one client to another
> a bit ugly. And currently it does not seem to me that Akonadi is finding
> widespread acceptance in projects outside the KDE world. Importing mails
> from a directory structure was not a problem between clients (to be honest
> I only tested with thunderbird and kmail). I do not like the idea of
> having data tied to a specific application.

 Migrating to another client should not be hard. For IMAP (be it 
disconnected or not), just set up the account in the other client. Yes, it 
will do a full sync, so it will take time and network traffic.
 For local mail (or POP3 downloading to a maildir), just point the other 
client (or KMail) to the maildir folder. 
 The whole idea of Akonadi is to not tie the data to a specific 
*application*. 

> My experience with database backups is very limited at best, but thank you
> for the pointers. I will have a look at the different options. I guess a
> drawback of the db-stop; rsync; start-db method is that backups can not be
> very frequent (e.g. hourly). Not that I do this frequent backups at the
> moment.

As explained in the blog, for the real data it is enough to sync the 
original source. So if you want to have a backup of your original mails, 
sync the maildir/mbox folder/files. For IMAP you need to backup on the 
server (or use some other tool, that does an IMAP sync on your backup 
machine). Of course in case of file system failure, you will lose metadata, 
but your mails should be still safe and restorable.

For example when I sync my mails between two computers, I just sync the 
maildir folder, not the akonadi database. Yes, I don't sync metadata, but I 
don't really care about that atm. This is similar to a simple backup.
Read/replied/etc. status should be synced this way as well.

Andras
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