To preserve &fml8; configurations, back up the following two directories: /usr/local/etc/fml/ $ml_home_prefix (e.g. /var/spool/ml/, domain specific) Attention: These directories holds all articles, log files and others et.al. It is better to back up MTA configurations, too. For example, /etc/postfix in the case of Postfix. In summary, the following three (generally speaking 2 + number of domains fml8 operatates) are targets. /etc/postfix/ /usr/local/etc/fml/ $ml_home_prefix (e.g. /var/spool/ml/) To back up &fml8; configurations, it is enough to back up the following two directories. But it is too large since they contains articles, log files and all contents. /usr/local/etc/fml/ $ml_home_prefix (e.g. /var/spool/ml/, domain specific) The hard disk is cheap. So it is safe to preserve all contents as could as possible. If you preserve only configuratoins, it is enough to back up the following files. It is useful to make a list of targets based on the file naming convension. In the case of &fml8;, a file with .cf extension is a configuration file. The format of .cf file is key = value style. This style configuration files follow /usr/local/etc/fml/main.cf /usr/local/etc/fml/site_default_config.cf /EACH_ML_HOME_DIRECTORY/config.cf et.al. Configuration files with other syntax are /usr/local/etc/fml/mime_component_filter /usr/local/etc/fml/ml_home_prefix This type of files are space separeted. /usr/local/etc/fml/ contains only configuration files. So back up all under them. Lists of mail addresses are /ML_HOME_DIRECTORY/members* /ML_HOME_DIRECTORY/recipients* Article delivery uses both recipients and members. For other roles, &fml8; uses members-$role and recipients-$role. So, back up all members* and recipients* files. Remote administration by command mail (admin command mail) uses the following password files /ML_HOME_DIRECTORY/etc/passwd-$role . Back up /ML_HOME_DIRECTORY/etc/ too. It is easy to back up all files except for the following large directories. They contains large data or temporary files. spool articles tmp temporary files var useful data If you use rsync, rsync --exclude is useful.