Moving Mailboxes to Another Disk
Document #:10438
Applies To:
- MailSite
7.x
- MailSite
8.x
- MailSite
9.x
Synopsis:
Mailboxes can be moved from one physical disk or server to another if required. Depending on how many mailboxes you have the approach to 'copying' these over will be different.
More Information:
Moving a Small Amount of Mailboxes
- Stop all the services
- Copy the BOX directory for your server over to the new disc or physical machine. We advise you to use a tool like robocopy so that all the timestamps of the emails within the BOX directory are preserved. Information on using robocopy can be found here. To download robocopy please follow this link.
- Within the MailSite console go to Server > Domains > example.com > Domain Properties. Alter the 'Mailbox Root Directory' to point to the new location. Click Ok
- Restart all the services
Moving a Large Amount of Mailboxes
To ensure the minimum amount of downtime with a large number of mailboxes you can follow the procedure below.
- Use robocopy to make a mirror of your mail store whilst all the services are live:
robocopy Source\Box \\Destination\Box /MIR /R:2 /W:1
This will take a while to do but can be done with the system live hence no downtime is experienced by your customers
- Once you have an initial copy you can run the command again to update the original copy with all the files that have been deleted or created since the first copy was made. This will take less time than the initial copy and again can be done with the services running
- Lastly turn off all mail store accessing services (SMTPDA POP3 IMAP) leaving SMTPRA running if you wish to receive and hold new mail and run the command for a final time. The number of changes should be few limiting the downtime
- Within the MailSite console go to Server > Domains > example.com > Domain Properties. Alter the 'Mailbox Root Directory' to point to the new location. Click Ok
- Restart all the services
You can also do this one domain at at time should you wish to reduce the amount of data copying over at a single point.
Related:
See these other knowledge base documents:
Last revised 2012-3-5