Hello,

If I'm reading:

(ls $users-$FILE_DELETE -t|head -n $DAYS_DELETE;ls $users-$FILE_DELETE )|sort|uniq -u|xargs rm

correctly I think run the backup script something other than once per day, it'll delete the wrong number of backup files. Unless you mean "DAYS_DELETE" to really mean number of files to keep, which would could also be a reasonable policy.

Perhaps something similar to find <dir> -name "$users-$FILE_DELETE" -a ctime +${DAYS_DELETE} might be a better test?

Mail addresses with a dash in the user or domainname get rejected by the script.

Adding dash to valid characters will fix this problem.

# rm -rf /srv/test && mkdir /srv/test && chown vmail:vmail /srv/test
# time doveadm sync -u [email protected] mdbox:/srv/test

real	213m51.795s
user	16m15.915s
sys	1m33.472s

# rm -rf /srv/test && mkdir /srv/test && chown vmail:vmail /srv/test
# time doveadm -o mail_fsync=never sync -u [email protected] mdbox:/srv/test

real	9m41.352s
user	9m0.082s
sys	0m30.458s

Also: creating a backup in the mdbox format is 15% faster in my tests than creating a backup using the maildir format backup, so that is also something that might make sense to change (beware of hierarchy separator changes though).

Hello, Ich use this really nice script but i have 2 requests:

First Request: Can you add some error-handling? For example in row 298

$DSYNC_COMMAND -o plugin/quota= -f -u $users backup $MAILDIR_TYPE:$LOCATION
is no error handling. Due to an bug in dovecot in version 2.3.0 and higher, the dysnc command failed in our environment for shared mailboxes because of an problem with ACLs. The script gives no feedback no matter it failed or succeded. Can you change this? Especially for:

$DSYNC_COMMAND -o plugin/quota= -f -u $users backup $MAILDIR_TYPE:$LOCATION (row 298)
$TAR_COMMAND -cvzf $users-$FILE_BACKUP $USERPART --atime-preserve --preserve-permissions (row 303)

Second Request: Add an summary for failed mailboxes so the user get an output like:

INFO: +-----------------------------------------------------------------+
INFO: | End backup dovecot_backup ..................................... |
INFO: | Successfully saved mailboxes: 15
INFO: | Errors in mailboxes:
INFO: |    - [email protected]
INFO: |    - [email protected]
INFO: |    - [email protected]
......
INFO: +-----------------------------------------------------------------+

We save around 50 mailboxes with this script. If you save so many or more mailboxes this summary
helps to determine which mailboxes have issues or not.

sincerely yours

Hi,

first of all - great script - thanks for sharing this.

Using

MAIL_STATUS='Y'

leads to

/usr/bin/cat: /tmp/dovecot_backup.log: No such file or directory

because of line 673.

Here you call movelog which remove the FILE_LAST_LOG before sending status email which trys to cat the FILE_LAST_LOG.

I just moved those line into the error if and everything works like a charn

# If errors occurred on user backups, exit with return code 1 instead of 0.
if [ "$VAR_COUNT_FAIL" -gt "0" ]; then
        sendmail ERROR
        # Move the log to the permanent log file.
        movelog
        exit 1
else
        # Status e-mail.
        if [ $MAIL_STATUS = 'Y' ]; then
                sendmail STATUS
        fi
        # Move the log to the permanent log file.
        movelog
        exit 0
fi

I'm not sure if you need movelog within the error part, but for the none error case it works.

regards
stefan

I currently have this error
dovecot_backup.sh: line 231: -f: command not found
But I only have it when I roll via crontab
running via crontab
0 4 * * * bash /opt/dovecot-backup/dovecot_backup.sh
running manually

bash /opt/dovecot-backup/dovecot_backup.sh

I got an error in 1.11 for my Ubuntu1804.
Check if command '/bin/mktemp' was found ..................[ OK ]
Check if command 'Usage:' was found .......................[FAILED]

I find the error and removed the --skip-alias to make it works.
MV_COMMAND=which mv
#MV_COMMAND=which --skip-alias mv

Good morning,

I like your script, and have also learnt some generic bash techniques I can use in unrelated scripts. However, I want to be able to select which user mailboxes I backup.

So I have expanded your script by making the following modifications:

• Moved personal options to a separate backup configuration file that is read by the script (this configuration file is now a command line option for backup_dovecot.sh).
• Added backup list path and filename variable to the backup configuration file that points to a list of mailboxes to back for that backup configuration.
• Created a file listing mailboxes to backup that is read by the configuration file as per added variable to backup configuration file.
• Created a backup user function that backup only specified user's mailbox that is called via iterating a list generated either from your original all dovecot mailboxes command or a list of users to backup if it exists. Defaults to backing up all mailboxes.

This does add to the number of files but allows the following new features:

• One can define and schedule multiple backups each with different options for the case where not all backups should have the same configuration.
• One can backup individual mailboxes or groups of mailboxes, each with their own backup configuration options.
• One can easily have different backups (e.g. weekly and monthly backups saving to different locations) that backup the same set of mailboxes. Or different mailboxes.

Would you be interested in this code and how should I get it to you?

I'm still very new to GitHub, but it seems the standard method of contributing is for me to fork your repository, make changes, and issue you with a pull request that you can then (if happy with changes) merge with your code. Is this what you would like me to do?

Thanks,

graue

Hi,

Just used your script to backup my imap/pop3 server mailboxes and I got the error above from dsync trying to backup a specific user mailbox. This happens only with this specific user because there is a folder created (by the user) using their mail client (they have created a Archives folder below Inbox).

Error: Can't create mailbox Archives/2018: Mailbox doesn't allow inferior mailboxes

In my dovecot file I have enabled the LAYOUT=fs option which supposedly should solve this issue but without any improvement.

Could you please help me ?

Thanks in advance.

It was not happened in Debian but the backup filename in Ubuntu has a single quotation. How to get rid of it?

-rw------- 1 vmail vmail 5294506 Mar 8 11:08 '[email protected]_backup.tar.gz'

How about an option to avoid deleting then decompressing the tar file, but just keeping the workdir ?
Sure it takes more space, but makes backup much faster and uses less active resources.

The LICENSE file in the root dir says GPL-3.0:

While the actual script says GPL-2.0 or later:

Not all email UIs are ok with the three letter timezone notation. Proposal is to change the notation to offset in hours

Current format is: Sun, 17 May 2020 10:41:48 (BST)
Proposed format is Sun, 17 May 2020 10:41:48 (+0100)

Line 176 would then be updated to
VAR_EMAILDATE=$DATE_COMMAND '+%a, %d %b %Y %H:%M:%S (%z)'

Hey there! Just wanted to try / use your script to backup dovecot maildirs / user emails.

https://pastebin.com/CB3y9Lxu

Just check this, as you can see i want to backup to a remote NFS mount, which causing permission problems. As i read the script, dsync try to do the "extract" directly to the backup target directory (/mnt/NFS/...) then create .tar.gz backup file from there.

Is there any way / chance to specify a "tmp" directory for dsync, which is different from BACKUP_DIR target ? Because it should solve the permission problems.

dsync want to use / run / put extration via the actual email user (USER.NAME in pastebin example) that will fail, because that user has 0 permission for the backup target directory. And this is good.

Any way to implement a "TMP_DSYNC_EXTRACT" directory for dsync operations, and keep BACKUP_DIR for backup target where the .tar.gz file will lands.

Sorry for my english, not my native.

Thanks!

Regards
Christian Hamar
Hungary

Hallo,
bei der Konfiguration mit Dovecot mit IPConfig und mdbox läuft das Script nicht
richtig.

Für das Backup kann man
doveadm backup -f -n inbox -u $user maildir:/srv/backup:LAYOUT=fs
benutzen.

Eingebaut in dein Script hat das Super Funktioniert.
DANKE!!!!! für deine Arbeit.

Das Tachtler Wiki gibt immer wieder Denkanstöße.

Gruss
Sven

Hallo,

bei mir funktioniert das Skript nicht, wenn der TMP_FOLDER nicht dem MAILDIR_USER gehört.

Ich hab also folgendes gemacht:
if [ ! -d "$TMP_FOLDER" ]; then
logline "Check if TMP_FOLDER exists " false
$MKDIR_COMMAND -p $TMP_FOLDER
$CHOWN_COMMAND -R $MAILDIR_USER:$MAILDIR_GROUP $TMP_FOLDER

OS: Ubuntu 20.04 -> umask 027 und ich benutze dsync

Hello,

if i start the script, the following error messages is comming:
"dovecot_backup.sh: 110: dovecot_backup.sh: Syntax error: "(" unexpected"

Can you help me?

I can run your by root but if I set the crontab to run your script, I got error below.

[...]
Check if command '/bin/mv' was found ......................[ OK ]
Check if command '' was found .............................[FAILED]

I found that cron job cannot find sendmail but if I run it from root, it finds the sendmail.

# command -v sendmail
/usr/sbin/sendmail

My crontab setting:
0 0 * * * /bin/sh /root/script/backup_dovecot.sh > /dev/null 2>&1

Hi, I found your script yesterday.

Unfortunately I got this error
dsync(): Warning: Failed to copy source UID=3350 mail: Mail size is larger than the maximum size allowed by server configuration - falling back to regular saving

Do you happen to know what I can do to fix this?
I googled around but did not find a solution (yet).

Regards, M

It works fine if i run the script from command manually, but it does not work when i run it in crontab. I checked it runs from the first line but not finish at the last line. Is there any permission I need to set?