On Wed, Jan 25, 2006 at 05:18:51PM -0700, Cameron Matheson enlightened us:
> I've recently gotten the appropriate holes cut in my firewall that allow 
> me to backup my mail server.  The problem is that Maildirs don't seem to 
> want to be backed up... the backups fail, w/ hundreds of errors like 
> these in the logs:
> 
> ?gtar:./home/vmail/fjcomm.com/V/foo.bar/new/1137800711.V805Iac017.zena.tonservices.com:
>  
> Warning: Cannot stat: No such file or directory
> 
> I tried googling for what exactly 'Cannot stat' means, but I didn't come 
> up w/ anything too conclusive.  Anyway, why exactly should there be so 
> many hundreds of these erros (mostly confined to one or two users 
> mailboxes (but different users every night). If i don't back up the 
> Maildirs, that server backs up just fine.  It doesn't seem like these 
> mailboxes should be changing *that* much overnight (maybe i'm wrong?).
> 

Maildir moves the files from the new/ directory to the cur/ directory when
they've been accessed. Usually this means that the user (or the user's mail
program) was running between the estimates being done and the backup being
performed. 

Matt

-- 
Matt Hyclak
Department of Mathematics 
Department of Social Work
Ohio University
(740) 593-1263