Disaster Recovery & Single Message Restore

[Ken Murchison]

Doug Koobs wrote:

> I'm testing our backup and recovery process. For backups, we shut down
> cyrus-imapd (installed via Simon's rpm's) and postfix, use cpio to backup
> /var/spool/mail and /var/lib/imap and /etc, then restart cyrus-imapd and
> postfix.
> 
> I've built a restore server, installed postfix and cyrus. Here is what I
> would like to do:
> 
> Create a test user and mailbox to verify that SMTP & IMAP are working
> together properly.
> Remove test mailbox and delete user
> Stop postfix and cyrus-imapd
> Restore /var/spool/imap and /var/lib/imap
> Make sure all files/directories are owned by cyrus:mail
> Copy user entries back into /etc/passwd and /etc/shadow (I'm using passwd
> for Cyrus authentication)
> 
> At this point, do I need to run reconstruct? If so, any options? I'm
> thinking I don't need to use it at all, since I stopped postfix and
> cyrus-imapd. Am I missing anything?

If the contents of the mailstore is static when you do the 
backup/restore, then reconstruct *shouldn't* be necessary.


> In regards to restoring just an email that someone accidentally deleted, how
> does this sound:
> 
> Create a top-level folder that will be the restore target
> Restore the contents of the directory containing the user's folder that
> needs to be restored into the directory containing the restore folder
> reconstruct that folder, and grant access to the user
> After the users has copied over the missing message to his own mailbox,
> remove the restore mailbox.

It can be done a lot simpler than that, and without having to involve 
the user.  Since message UIDs are guaranteed to be unique, no existing 
message will have the same UID as a deleted one.  You can simply restore 
the deleted messages directly into the mailbox from which they came and 
then reconstruct the mailbox to get them added to cyrus.index and 
cyrus.cache.

I do this more frequently than I would like, but its works just fine.

-- 
Kenneth Murchison     Oceana Matrix Ltd.
Software Engineer     21 Princeton Place
716-662-8973 x26      Orchard Park, NY 14127
--PGP Public Key--    http://www.oceana.com/~ken/ksm.pgp
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