On 12/11/2024 12:28, Steve Atkins via dovecot wrote:

I’m running 2.3.19.1 on a system that isn’t set up to support filesystem snapshots.

So I’d like to back up my mdbox mailboxes at a filesystem level (with rsync, or something equivalent). I’m assuming that to get a consistent backup I should lock the mailbox while I copy it.

How should I acquire a (write) lock on an mdbox mailbox?

Cheers, Steve

Do you have a quiet time? My server is a family server, so quiet overnight. Some businesses are the same. I stop delivery from postfix to Dovecot when I back up Dovecot and then restart it and flush the queue afterwards.