From: Ian G Batten (no email)
Date: Fri Apr 04 2003 - 09:49:50 EST
On Fri, 04 Apr 2003, Phil Chambers wrote:
> I am concerned that because Cyrus is a "black box" system which keeps track of its
> own internal organisation we may have problems if we restore a disc from our
> backups. It will take hours to do a backup and the files within the Cyrus structure
> will be changing as we do it. Are there going to be problems with inconsistencies
> between files?
There are two answers to this. The first is that doing snapshot backups
should be possible on most plausible platforms, either by dropping a
mirror off (requires mirroring, of course) or using fssnap (Sun) or LVM
(Linux) to do a hot backup.
The second is that in practice you can recover a mailbox by spinning on
the files and then using reconstruct to rebuild the metadata. The worst
you're going to do is break the unread flags and suchlike.
> There is a secondary, but important use of our current backup service, which is to
> dig users out of a hole when they make mistakes: Occasionally a user will
> accidentally delete a message or even a whole folder and then come and ask if I can
> recover it for them.
We do that all the time. We pull the entire mailbox back, then grep for
what the punter wants.
> With our current backup system it is ussually very easy because I have no problem
> identifying the relevant files to be recovered. I seems to that it will be
> impossible to recover deleted messages because I will not be able to identify the
> files which I need. If I can identify the files, presumably there is no way to get
> them back into the Cyrus system?
If you can identify them by size or date, you just put them back into
the mailbox and reconstruct it.
ian
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