From: Ken Murchison (no email)
Date: Thu Mar 29 2007 - 14:57:36 EDT
Michael D. Sofka wrote:
> I am working on a way to recover deleted (and purged) messages in Cyrus
> IMAP. This is not as silly as it may at first sound. On Exchange there
> is a setting whereby deleted items are not deleted from the server until
> they are backed up. Before this time, they can be ``recovered'' from
> the deleted items folder. (Why not, they're still available to the
> system.)
>
> Likewise, in our AFS file space (those were the days) we mount the
> read-only backup volume in a directory called "./yesterday" so that
> "oops, I didn't mean to delete that!" did not result in a phone call to
> operations to restore a file. In AFS the backup volume is a "copy on
> write" snapshot of the volume created for backup. Mounting these gave
> access to the contents prior to the start of that day's backup. (And,
> AFS and Cyrus IMAP share a mother, if only by adoption.... :-)
>
>
> With that as background, our Cyrus IMAP servers use LVM snapshots for
> backups. We make the snapshot, mount it, back it up, and unmount it.
> Fairly standard. After a couple calls to restore "oops" inboxes, I
> thought maybe the snapshot could be mounted as a read-only IMAP
> partition. Users could access this to recover accidentally deleted
> messages.
>
> Alas, it is not quite that simple. The snapshot would just appear
> to Cyrus IMAP. The mailboxes database would then have to be updated
> with this new information, the access information would need to be
> set, etc. However, I am wondering if there isn't some trick,
> latent, in Cyrus IMAP to allow this feature. (If not, it goes on
> my way to long projects list---and I wouldn't mind if somebody
> beat me to it.)
Mike,
This might be worth discussing on the list.
-- Kenneth Murchison Systems Programmer Project Cyrus Developer/Maintainer Carnegie Mellon University
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