Backup and Restore strategies for Cyrus IMAP folders

[Daniel Nilsson]

> 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?
>
> This procedure is fine.

I have a question / concern regarding this, we use this method as well to
restore entries that the users have deleted my misstake. But sometimes
when the same message is delivered to multiple users on the same server,
messages appear to be stored on the disk as hard links by cyrus (?) to
appear is all receipients mailboxes. What happens is that the message
might have been moved / deleted from the location it was linked to
inbetween the time the user deletes his message and when we actually get
around to read it back from the tape. The tape restore tries to restore
the hard link but the source of the hard link is now moved/deleted, so the
restore fails.

This doesn't happen that often, but we have a small number of users on the
system. Does anyone else have similar experiences ? We are running Cyrus
v2.0.16 on Solaris 8 with the mailboxes on a UFS filesystem.

Thanks
-- 
Daniel Nilsson
Senior Consultant
Signal Integrity Software Inc.
6 Clock Tower Place, Suite 250
Maynard, MA 01754
Phone: (978) 461-0449, ext 12
Cell:  (508) 783-1379
http://www.sisoft.com