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From: Rudy Gevaert (no email)
Date: Thu Mar 29 2007 - 17:18:37 EDT
Ken Murchison wrote:
> 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.)
Have you tried taking a snapshot of your configuration directory and
contants of /var/imap (e.g.). If you start cyrus on the snapshots what
happens?
I haven't tried that, because we had some problems with LVS snapshots.
I haven't got a clue how cyrus reacts on read only filesystems. Maybe
Ken can answer that.
Rudy
-- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- Rudy Gevaert tel:+32 9 264 4734 Directie ICT, afd. Infrastructuur Direction ICT, Infrastructure dept. Groep Systemen Systems group Universiteit Gent Ghent University Krijgslaan 281, gebouw S9, 9000 Gent, Belgie www.UGent.be -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- --
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