Re: moving email repos to another machine

[Oswald B. <osw...@gm...>]

On Tue, Feb 03, 2015 at 11:16:18AM +0800, Eric Abrahamsen wrote:
> I just got a new desktop and am looking to replicate my email setup from
> my laptop to the new machine. I have a local dovecot server running on
> both machines now, same configuration, and use mbsync to sync several
> addresses.
> 
> I've rsync'd the actual maildirs onto the new desktop, but before I do
> any server syncing I wanted to check here first: how do I handle isync's
> uidvalidity files? Is it enough just to copy the ~/.mbsync/ directory
> over to the new computer? Or should I allow those files to be
> re-created? Any tips/reassurances would be appreciated.
> 
if the copy of the maildirs was verbatim and complete (which means that
the same messages are available under the same uids, and the server
announces the same uidvalidity), then it will work.
if the uidvalidity changed, the sync will be simply rejected. then you
can delete the local folders and sync state, and start from scratch, or
delete only the sync state, see messages being duplicated both ways, and
then deduplicate (mutt: D~=).
if the uidvalidity stayed the same but the actual uids changed, you'd
lose mail (to verify, you can take some samples by enabling the "order
received" colum in the thunderbird message view, for example). you could
recover from that by having another fully synchronized store and
deleting the associated sync state *before* the next sync run, so the
whole backup is considered "new" and replicated.