offline-imap for backup (2010 edition)

[Josh Rickmar]

On Tue, Aug 10, 2010 at 10:30:35PM +0200, Michael Williams wrote:
> Has there been any changes to the suitability of offline-imap for backup (rather than bidirectional sync) since it was discussed on this list in 2007: http://thread.gmane.org/gmane.mail.imap.offlineimap.general/824/focus=835
> 
> As discussed then, bidirectional sync risks user error/filesystem problems being catastrophically propagated upstream. A couple of rather hacky and fragile workarounds were suggested (including taking a backup of the backup, and checking the backup for changes since the last time offlineimap was run before allowing offlineimap to run again).
> 
> It seems, however, that the most robust place to implement this would be in offlineimap itself. Any plans/news there?
> 
> As far as I can tell, no other tool is ideally suited to this (see http://ask.metafilter.com/161868/IMAP-backup). imapgrab (a wrapper around getmail) comes closest, but does not retain read/replied/etc. flags, i.e. it is not an exact copy.
> 
> -- Mike
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> 
> OfflineIMAP homepage: http://software.complete.org/offlineimap

fdm (http://fdm.sourceforge.net/) may be a good choice.  Just be
sure to invoke it with the -k flag or use the 'keep' account setting
in your ~/.fdm.conf.