dovecot - Aug 2006 - OT: best way to move maildirs to another host ?

Hi,

I'm sorry because this mail is a little bit off-topic, but Timo's email
titled "1.0RC7 Released" made me think about a possible issue for me.

I have to move an old dovecot installation (1.0b2) from an i386 server
to a new x86_64 server running latest available dovecot.

My concern is about moving all my users' mail stored as maildir onto
this new server.
What would be the best way to do that ?
>From Timo's comment on 32bits->64bits migration, I guess I'll
have to
move only the maildirs (and get rid of dovecot cache files), right ?

Next, from what I remember about maildir, the message names usually
contain the inode so that the file name is unique. If I strictly move
the files, I can be sure that the moved files won't have the same inodes
number as what is in the name.
Should I care ?

Or should I use something different than scp/rsync to perform the
migration ?

Thanks for your answers,
Regards,
-- 
Brice Figureau <brice+dovecot at daysofwonder.com>

On Friday 18 August 2006 09:27, Brice Figureau wrote:
> ...
> Next, from what I remember about maildir, the message names usually 
> contain the inode so that the file name is unique. If I strictly
> move the files, I can be sure that the moved files won't have the
> same inodes number as what is in the name.
> Should I care ?
> ...
No.

Re. inode numbers: Checkout the spec on,
   http://cr.yp.to/proto/maildir.html
Your filenames should therefore be of the form,
   time.something.host
where 'something' _may_ include the inode number (depends on your 
delivery mechanism). This is only meaningful insofar as it makes the 
filename unique - the host and timestamp fields also contribute to 
the uniqueness. When you move your messages, the timestamp will be 
'in the past' for the new server, so even if you were to duplicate an 
inode number, the timestamp would still ensure uniqueness.

cheers,

Andrew.