Backup and Restore strategies for Cyrus IMAP folders

[Ken Murchison]

Earl R Shannon wrote:
> 
> Hello,
> 
> If you restore back to the users inbox you run the chance, although
> probably small, of overwriting a message. For instance. If a message
> already exists in the mailbox that has a file name 42. and your
> restoration puts back a file named 42. then if they have different


Unless the mailbox was previously corrupted, this can't happen.  The
UIDs of IMAP messages (which Cyrus uses as the filenames) are guaranteed
to be unique within a mailbox, so a UID will never be reused.  So, when
you restore messages into a mailbox, either they will be messages that
have been previously deleted, or they will be the same as existing
messages.


> contents you have lost the first message. To prevent this we do our
> restorations to a folder we create simply named BACKUP. We also give
> this folder the same quota as the user's inbox. Then after two weeks we
> remove the BACKUP folder( and subfolders ).
> 
> Regards,
> Earl Shannon
> 
> Gary Mills wrote:
> > There has been some discussion here recently on ways of restoring
> > messages that have been accidentally deleted by Cyrus users.  We do
> > frequent backups of the Cyrus filesystems.  Our restore procedure is
> > simply to restore the `NNN.' files that contain the messages, and
> > then run `reconstruct user.USER' and `quota -f user.USER', at least
> > when the files were in INBOX.
> >
> > Is there anything wrong with this procedure?  We do it while Cyrus
> > is running.  Is this safe to do?
> >

-- 
Kenneth Murchison     Oceana Matrix Ltd.
Software Engineer     21 Princeton Place
716-662-8973 x26      Orchard Park, NY 14127
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