[MlMt] Horcrux email backup or something like it--good idea?

[Bill Cole]

I'm not specifically familiar with Horcrux, but whether you need a 
distinct tool for email backup is dependent on your own specific 
circumstances. If you use TimeMachine on a Mac running MailMate, you 
have backups of all your email in the MailMate message cache: 
~/Library/Application Support/MailMate/Messages/IMAP, which has 
subdirectories for each account with directory trees mimicking your 
server-side IMAP folder structure. If you need to restore email, you can 
restore whatever messages you need from there in TimeMachine to a 
different folder and then use MM's File->Import Messages... command to 
restore them and upload them to your IMAP server.

If you have a very large number of messages and use TimeMachine over a 
network, backing up that cache with TimeMachine can be painfully slow 
and one may decide not to bother backing it up, since it is a replica of 
what is on your IMAP server. Because MM deems the IMAP server as always 
the authoritative source of truth about your email, so in the event of 
some catastrophic deletion event on the server, MM would dutifully 
delete the messages in its cache. So not having any backup is a bad 
idea. If TimeMachine is too slow for you or if you need a different 
retention pattern, maybe something like Horcrux will work better. Other 
people here have said good things about EagleFiler 
(https://c-command.com/eaglefiler/) but I also can't speak to that tool 
specifically.


-- 
Bill Cole
bill at scconsult.com or billcole at apache.org
(AKA @grumpybozo and many *@billmail.scconsult.com addresses)
Not Currently Available For Hire