Backup & Restore IMAP Email Messages (Cold Storage)

[Richard8]

I have a few gigantic DirectAdmin accounts that are becoming too large to timely back up. I need to backup and restore email messages without actually starting a DA backup. Is it possible to manually copy (scp/sftp) the IMAP email messages and copy them back (restore) without having to start a server-level backup?

For example, if I have 100 emails in 1 email account, and I copy them offsite then delete half of them, can I simply copy them back (upload the message files back to the IMAP directory) to "restore" emails from a cold storage?

I'm ultimately trying to backup, delete, and restore a handful of email accounts' messages/attachments without invoking excessive server resources to properly backup the entire account through the web control panel.

Thanks in advance for any insight before I do some trial and error in our development environment.

 

[Active8]

I had just made similar in the past:

1. Make backup from the account in full
2. copied that to an backup server
3. some later email needed for the customer but was imap so it was not there any more
4. made an fresh backup of the account
5. restored the old backup with emails /sites/db
6. after restoring the old backup restored the latest backup I made at 4
7. all the mails are there but are not visible to the customer
8. restored the permission with the permission script
9. now the customer have all their mail incl the old one from the backup + new site

 

[Richard G]

You can also use Mailstore Home. It's free and archives all e-mails and folders (configurable).
It creates an encrypted kind of database offline, easy to backup but you can also search mails.

Or you can delete what you want and restore what's left to the server. As far as that part goes, I believe you can only restore to 1 folder, but I'm not sure about that. Might be also that all subfolders are created in this specific restore folder (did not test it).

This can be done at your own pc, you don't need a server for that.

So now you have 2 options which can be used.

 

[Richard G]

However, experts have recommended opting for some advanced IMAP Mail Backup Tool

No you come here only to advertise some tool which you have to pay for and is really 0% better than doing a local backup with pst and ost files or using a free professional (also expert) tool like Mailstore Home, which can do almost all the same as that imap mail backup tool which costs money.