OSX Mail Server Issue

[jislord]

Ran into a very strange mail issue….
I decided to write a script to backup emails of all users in my OSX 10.3.9 server (script attached below). I included this script in my crontab. It ran fine, backed up all emails. However, when the mail server started again, none of the email accounts were functioning. When I checked Server Admin, I found that the mail storage path had changed for all users to “Unknown Mailbox Path”. All settings for mail were however identical. The mail store path was still “/var/spool/imap”.
After a struggle, I got everything up and running by reconstructing all mailboxes. Now, I am afraid to run this script again.. Any pointers?

-J

#!/bin/bash

# keep 5 days of mail backups #
ditto /Backup/Daily/var.imap.old3/ /Backup/Daily/var.imap.old4/
ditto /Backup/Daily/var.imap.old2/ /Backup/Daily/var.imap.old3/
ditto /Backup/Daily/var.imap.old1/ /Backup/Daily/var.imap.old2/
ditto /Backup/Daily/var.imap/ /Backup/Daily/var.imap.old1/

ditto /Backup/Daily/var.spool.imap.old3/ /Backup/Daily/var.spool.imap.old4/
ditto /Backup/Daily/var.spool.imap.old2/ /Backup/Daily/var.spool.imap.old3/
ditto /Backup/Daily/var.spool.imap.old1/ /Backup/Daily/var.spool.imap.old2/
ditto /Backup/Daily/var.spool.imap/ /Backup/Daily/var.spool.imap.old1/

# backup active mail directories #
/usr/sbin/serveradmin stop mail
ditto /var/imap/ /Backup/Daily/var.imap/
ditto /var/spool/imap/ /Backup/Daily/var.spool.imap/
/usr/sbin/serveradmin start mail

[jislord]

Some more details:

I think I have narrowed down the problem. Still need a solution though !

When I do a “serveradmin mail stop”, it does not stop postfix.
When I do a “postfix stop”, even then, it starts again automatically !!.
I am sure that postfix is corrupting the cyrus databases when they are being backed up. Any ideas?

[jislord]

I am not sure what kind of programs that you mean? I have the default config: postfix is the mta and cyrus is the imap server. Would clients requesting imap or pop data also start these services automatically?

[Pascal]

I know this is late, but shouldn’t it say ‘serveradmin stop mail’ instead of ‘serveradmin mail stop’?

[Author]

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