manual backup

[funkywaddle]

I was an idiot and upgraded my server from 22.04 to 24.04. MIAB itself stopped working, but the individual pieces (postfix, dovecot, etc) seemed to work just fine for a little bit. But now, even they seem to have stopped.

I know the work has been started to upgrade the newest version of Ubuntu 26.04, but I can't wait that long without email.

I tried to manually run the backup script, but it's producing an error about "no module 'dateutil'".

How can I manually backup MIAB, so I can get my server back to 22.04, and not lose all my email addresses, domains, settings, etc?

[funkywaddle]

It seems like what is failing, why my Thunderbird client can't connect to download the emails, is the domain server. Every domain that my email server hosts is unreachable.

I logged into the server and checked the nsd service, and it seems to be running:

● nsd.service - Name Server Daemon
     Loaded: loaded (/usr/lib/systemd/system/nsd.service; enabled; preset: enabled)
     Active: active (running) since Sun 2026-05-10 03:31:59 UTC; 15h ago
       Docs: man:nsd(8)
   Main PID: 950 (nsd: xfrd)
      Tasks: 3 (limit: 1027)
     Memory: 23.8M (peak: 42.6M swap: 24.9M swap peak: 38.1M)
        CPU: 24.346s
     CGroup: /system.slice/nsd.service
             ├─ 950 /usr/sbin/nsd -d -P
             ├─1023 /usr/sbin/nsd -d -P
             └─1108 /usr/sbin/nsd -d -P

May 10 03:31:53 [redacted] systemd[1]: Starting nsd.service - Name Server Daemon...
May 10 03:31:55 [redacted] nsd[950]: [2026-05-10 03:31:55.712] nsd[950]: error: Cannot open /var/log/nsd.log for appending (Read-only file system), logging to stderr
May 10 03:31:55 [redacted] nsd[950]: [2026-05-10 03:31:55.712] nsd[950]: notice: nsd starting (NSD 4.8.0)
May 10 03:31:59 [redacted] nsd[1023]: [2026-05-10 03:31:59.804] nsd[1023]: notice: nsd started (NSD 4.8.0), pid 950
May 10 03:31:59 [redacted] systemd[1]: Started nsd.service - Name Server Daemon.

But, I can't reach anything that is handled via MIAB (anything with a custom dns record, anything hosted via MIAB (like /mail, /admin, etc)).

[funkywaddle]

If anyone knows what files or directories needs to be backed up, so that I can back it up manually, I would be extremely grateful.

Or at a minimum, help me fix whatever is going on with my dns, so that I can get my emails.

I can hold off on MIAB gui for a bit, but I really need access to my emails.