imap-backup backup

This command runs the backup operation using information provided by a configuration file created using imap-backup setup.

By default, emails for all configured accounts are copied to disk.

The backup is incremental and interruptible, so backups won't get messed up if your connection goes down during an operation.

Single Account Backups

As an alternative, if you only want to backup a single account, you can pass all the necessary parameters directly to the single backup command (see the single backup docs).

Serialized Format

Emails are stored on disk in Mbox files, one for each folder, with metadata stored in Imap files.

The Imap file contains information about the email messages stored in the Mbox file. For each, it has the offset to the start of the message and its length.

Output

Verbose output can be configured by adding the --verbose (or -v) parameter. Add that parameter twice will also show all network traffic between imap-backup and the IMAP server.