2022-05-28: On Simplicity and Keeping Backups rak
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Today, I was quite grateful that I make daily backups of all of
my emails (and other files): dovecot's dbox mail storage somehow
silently got corrupted two days ago and lost ~90% of my mail.
Fortunately, I've been able to recover all of my mail as of two
days ago, though it's unclear whether I lost any mail in
between.
I've also decided to ditch dbox in favour of good old fashioned
Maildir. dbox is dovecot's high-performance mailbox format, and
it comes in two variants. I was initially using the mdbox
variant for a few years. It works by storing multiple messages
in files, each with a global identifier, and then mailboxes are
collections of pointers into those files. The catch is that the
integrity of a mailbox is dependent on a single (in my
experience, easily corrupted) file. I then switched to the
slightly simpler sdbox variant, which stores mailbox messages as
individual files in folders, but still stores key mailbox data
in a single file. Though these performant mailbox formats are
nice in principle, I'm a single user and any minor performance
improvement provided by dbox is not worth wasting hours every 6
months restoring mail from backups when dovecot self-destructs.
Back to vanilla maildir for me, which will hopefully avoid any
more mail loss.
