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# Archive Partitions

Archive partitions are defined by the `archivepartition-name` option in imapd.conf(5):

> `archivepartition-name:` <none>

> > The pathname of the archive partition name, corresponding to spool partition partition-name. For any mailbox residing in a directory on partition-name, the archived messages will be stored in a corresponding directory on archivepartition-name. Note that not every partition-name option is strictly required to have a corresponding archivepartition-name option, but that without one there’s no benefit to enabling archiving.

As is the case with metadata partitions, however, archive partitions do not stand alone. They are closely bound to Spool Directories as defined by the accompanying `partition-name` directive.

Multiple partitions may be used for various reasons, such as to distribute load between different storage pools or technologies. Please consult Mail Spool Partitions for more details and use cases.

To define additional mail spools, add more `partition-name` entries to imapd.conf(5) as needed. For example, let’s imagine we want to migrate users to new partitions split by first character of the user’s last name, and add a partition for shared mailboxes (see Shared Namespaces):

- Sample:

      defaultpartition: main
      partition-main: /var/spool/cyrus
      partition-am: /var/spool/cyrus-am
      partition-nz: /var/spool/cyrus-nz
      partition-shared: /var/spool/cyrus-shared

So, to add archiving to the system described above, we would need something like this (again, building on our previous examples):

- Sample:

      defaultpartition: main
      partition-main: /var/spool/cyrus
      partition-am: /var/spool/cyrus-am
      partition-nz: /var/spool/cyrus-nz
      partition-shared: /var/spool/cyrus-shared
      archive_enabled: yes
      archivepartition-main: /var/spool/cyrusarchive/main
      archivepartition-am: /var/spool/cyrusarchive/am
      archivepartition-nz: /var/spool/cyrusarchive/nz
      archivepartition-shared: /var/spool/cyrusarchive/shared