Concerned WAS RE: recovering from mailbox.db corruption cyrus 2_2

[Edward Zarecor]

I haven't had any problems running a couple small cyrus implementations 
for around three years until today when I had a hardware crash.  I 
hadn't verified my backups were working recently and they weren't.  For 
this I have no one to blame but myself.  I was able to recovered 
everything in the end though.

Ed.  

John Alton Tamplin wrote:

> Thiago Lima wrote:
>
>>     Now with that thread I became a little afraid. I'm going to use
>> cyrus as a backend pop3/imap server for thousands of users, and I cannot
>> affort that the db file could get corrupted and can't be recovered.  
>>
> That's what backups are for.  If the OS crashes or there are program 
> bugs, there is always the possibility of corruption.
>
> For what it's worth, I have used various versions of Cyrus at 3 
> employers over the past 8 years and never once had to use a backup for 
> anything besides user error ("I accidentally deleted all my email, 
> could I get it back?").
>
>>     In the cyrus website we see that "The private mailbox database
>> design gives the server large advantages in efficiency, scalability, and
>> administratability. Multiple concurrent read/write connections to the
>> same mailbox are permitted. The server supports access control lists on
>> mailboxes and storage quotas on mailbox hierarchies" but I couldn't find
>> docs about how this format really is.  
>>
> Unless you are planning on writing code, I am not sure why you care. 
> There are tools provided with Cyrus to convert these databases to and 
> from text, and I recommend using them to create a fail-safe backup if 
> you are backing up the structured databases without the server being 
> shutdown.
>
>>     There's any good documentation about this? Maybe the IMAP book
>> from ORA?
>>  
>>
> It is quite old.  There is documentation included with the Cyrus 
> distribution and on the website, but it doesn't really cover the 
> internals much.  If you are into it, the code is quite easy to follow 
> (for me anyway) to understand what is going on.
>