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

[John Alton Tamplin]

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.

-- 
John A. Tamplin                               Unix System Administrator
Emory University, School of Public Health     +1 404/727-9931