Backup and Restore strategies for Cyrus IMAP folders

[Ken Murchison]

Gary Mills wrote:
> 
> On Tue, Apr 15, 2003 at 05:04:19PM -0400, Brian wrote:
> >
> > Gary Mills said:
> > > 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.
> >
> > Having done this in the past, I know there's nothing technically wrong
> > with it, but you do lose the state of the messages which can be annoying
> > if you have thousands of messages in your mailboxes as I do.
> 
> Are you saying that `reconstruct' resets the flags of all of the
> messages?  That would be a major problem.  If it's only the flags
> of the restored messages, then it's not so bad.

recontruct tries to use any "sane" index and cache entries that it
finds.  This means that if you're reconstructing a corrupted mailbox,
then flags may be reset for some messages.  If you're reconstructing
just to add recovered messages, then the flags of existing messages
won't be touched.

> Is there a way to preserve and restore flags of deleted messages?

Not that I'm aware of.

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