copying offlineimap-managed maildir across machines

[Dominic LoBue]

On Wed, Jun 2, 2010 at 7:16 PM, Richard Cobbe <cobbe at ccs.neu.edu> wrote:
> I use offlineimap v6.2.0 with two email accounts, one GMail and the other
> standard IMAP, syncing both with a maildir repository on the local machine.
>
> Actually, I do this on *two* local machines, each with an independent
> maildir repository, stored on the respective machines' local disks.
> (Should it matter, the machines are MacOS: one 10.6, and one 10.5 shortly
> to be upgraded.)
>
> I'm in the process of doing some fairly significant and overdue spring
> cleaning on the mail accounts that will involve the deletion of lots of
> messages and folders.  Since the process for deleting a folder is a little
> laborious (delete the folder from the maildir repository, delete the folder
> from the IMAP server, delete the account metadata in ~/.offlineimap, run
> offlineimap to resync & recreate the metadata), I'd like to do all of this
> on just one of the two client machines, and then copy the Maildir and
> .offlineimap directories onto the other client machine, using rsync or
> something like that.
>
> Assuming I copy both, will that be safe?  Will offlineimap just pick up
> with the new repository on the second client machine?
>
> Or should I just rsync the maildir repository, delete the offlineimap
> metadata on the second machine, and rerun offlineimap to regenerate it?
>
> All suggestions welcome.
>
> Thanks,
>
> Richard
>
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>
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>

Richard,

So long as you use rsync's --delete flag, there's no technical reason
why what you're asking about should fail.

I won't say there's no way it can go wrong, but there's nothing in the
code that will flip out if you copy everything over from one machine
to another.

Good luck!

-- 
Dominic LoBue