Quoting Franky Goethals
Hi Jeffrey,
I'm using cyrus-imapd, and want to make sure i never will lose my mails, so i need a completely safe backup-procedure.
Thanks in advance for the help !
AFAIK, Cyrus uses its own format. You will need to check the Cyrus documentation if it has any support for hot backup or snapshot. Otherwise, shutdown the IMAP server, backup the files, and restart the server. For a shorted down time, shutdown the server, copy the files to disk, start the server, backup the copies. Jeffrey P.S. If Cyrus uses separate files for each message (like Maildir format), just backup the files. You might lose a message or two infrequently, but difficult backup procedures, in my experience, have reduced frequency. Better to backup early and often (and less than perfectly) then perfectly and infrequently.