Backup and Restore strategies for Cyrus IMAP folders

[Earl R Shannon]

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 
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?
>