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File & Directory Locations

Cyrus IMAP maintains several directories for configuration, state and data storage. The locations of these directories and, in many cases, of individual files, may be controlled by settings in :cyrusman:`imapd.conf(5)`.

.. toctree::
    :maxdepth: 1
    :glob:

    locations/*

Partitions

Partitioning is a means to divide storage resources into separate pools and may be defined for the following types of data:

Please consult the documents linked above for more information on these.

You may also find more examples and possible scenarios in the document on :ref:`imap-features-mailbox-distribution`.

In general, Cyrus allows one to maintain several separate partitions for each of these data types, and to establish rules governing distribution of data within each pool.

Types of Partitions

Cyrus supports several different types of partitions:

  • Mail Spool Partitions
  • Metadata Partitions
  • Archive Partitions
  • Search Partitions

Each of these are discussed in their own sections of the documentation. All share in common a few aspects in how they are configured. For each partition defined, you must tell Cyrus where the partition is rooted in the filesystem. This is accomplished via a "partition-name:" directive for each partition, where "partition" specifies the partition type and "name" is the actual name of the partition.

Here are some sample declarations of each different type of partition supported within Cyrus. For the purposes of this example, we'll stipulate the following:

  • There are two main storage pools, "fast" and "slow," which are on SSDs and traditional disks, respectively.
  • The mailboxes are divided alphabetically, with A to M in one group and N to Z in the other.
# The Mail Spool Partitions
partition-atom: /var/spool/cyrus/fast/mail/atom/
partition-ntoz: /var/spool/cyrus/fast/mail/ntoz/

# The Metadata Partitions
metapartition-atom: /var/spool/cyrus/fast/meta/atom/
metapartition-ntoz: /var/spool/cyrus/fast/meta/ntoz/

# Archive Partitions
archivepartition-atom: /var/spool/cyrus/slow/mail/atom/
archivepartition-ntoz: /var/spool/cyrus/slow/mail/ntoz/

# Search Partitions
defaultsearchtier: tier1
tier1searchpartition-atom: /var/spool/cyrus/slow/search/atom/
tier1searchpartition-ntoz: /var/spool/cyrus/slow/search/ntoz/

Working With Partitions

All partition operations are controlled via settings in :cyrusman:`imapd.conf(5)`, and thus require server restarts to effect. There are no administrative commands to manipulate partitions.

Here are the settings for each class of partition:

Mail Spool Partitions

While Cyrus itself has no default values for these settings, most distributions use default and /var/spool/cyrus or /var/spool/cyrus:

Metadata Partitions

Metadata is information used to process the mailbox data, rather than the contents of the messages withing the mailbox. Examples include headers, caches, indexes, etc.

Archive Partitions

Cyrus Archiving will migrate mailbox data from the normal mail spool partitions to separate archive partitions, based upon criteria such as age and size. Typical use cases would be to keep so-called "hot" data, such as recent messages, on fast drives, such as SSDs, and migrate "cold" data, such as older or large messages, to slower but cheaper media.

Search Partitions

Modern Cyrus uses the Xapian search engine to index messages for server-side search support. Index data are stored in search "tiers" which are themselves related to search partitions. There are two key settings for search tiers:

Back to :ref:`imap-admin`