Restoring backups didn't seem to help

[thoughtful]

I don’t have many user accounts, is it not an option to simply backup both instances and restore them both to the same machine? probably not but it sounds nice

Merging two machines to One

I have two instances of MiaB, but I want to change and run those under a single machine. any tips or tricks on how I might achieve this with minimal diruption? anything to avoid here? Thanks!

@openletter

An issue with MiaB is long TTLs, which makes this sort of thing somewhat more difficult. The best I could offer is run imapsync to add the new account messages, make the necessary DNS changes, keeping both server DNSSEC keys on the domains being transferred (this is permitted under RFC for exactly this purpose), probably have to manually make any custom DNS entries, and run imapsync somewhat regularly until finally everything is using the new server.

I’m not sure how to deal with active user accounts, other than have them create two separate accounts on their clients. This is probably a quagmire if you have a large number of users.

Or maybe there is a way to create a second mx record, since MiaB default is priority 10, you could make a priority 5 mx record that is for the new server, and then update SPF records so sending passes with the new server IP address.

Honestly, just kind of brainstorming here. Was hoping someone else would be able to suggest something for you.

[openletter]

Hm, that’s kind of a different question: If you restore MiaB to an existing MiaB, is the existing one overwritten? I don’t know. Usually this is done to clean installs of MiaB, where there isn’t really anything to be overwritten.

[thoughtful]

seems to be simple as adding users with the same names on the new machine, swapping out all the settings to point to new IP, copy the emails from the old mailbox to the new one, and all is well with the world

lots of steps, but I think will be oke

[thoughtful]

upon further review… I managed to salvage the mail from 1 out of 4 mailboxes… for some reason restoring the backups did 0 to help and my only chance was the ability to pull the same account into thunderbird twice, and copy the messages before imap deleted all my originals

I followed instructions pretty carefully, I thought.

Do I really need all that mail?

Gee I sure hope not

[stylnchris]

I believe the backup restore process is meant to go to a “fresh” box not from one mailinabox sever to an already existing sever.

I think you had it right earlier. Add the users on the other sever, copy the maildir over to the new server and probably need to backup via csv contacts, restore. Then move calendar over via export/import.

Finalize DNS, etc

[thoughtful]

ooookaaay!

I went through all the trouble to copy my maildir files to a local machine, converted them to mbox… couldn’t figure how to import them thru thunderbird, read I can import thru mailinabox web…

only to find out ALL OF MY EMAIL is there living on the web version but not at home on my client.

haaalp! I clearly need it

[thoughtful]

check that, since as soon as I finished that post the messages all appeared in my inbox

but they didn’t re-appear in servers I didn’t copy over dovecot maildir from… so I’m gonna just guess that worked but I guess just needed a client restart to kick in

I have a couple more mailboxes to play with but the most important one is recovered

I think I’ve learned something here, but I’m not sure…
oh yes… all that missing mail is the reason i was depressed this morning pretty sure that was it.