Disaster Recovery & Single Message Restore

[Doug Koobs]

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?

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.


Thanks!
Doug

My apologies for the following footer...



Confidential: This electronic message and all contents contain information from Financial Credit Services which may be privileged, confidential or otherwise protected from disclosure. The information is intended to be for the addressee only. If you are not the addressee, any disclosure, copy, distribution or use of the contents of this message is prohibited. If you have received this electronic message in error, please notify the sender and destroy the original message and all copies.

---
Cyrus Home Page: http://asg.web.cmu.edu/cyrus
Cyrus Wiki/FAQ: http://cyruswiki.andrew.cmu.edu
List Archives/Info: http://asg.web.cmu.edu/cyrus/mailing-list.html