backup imapd with TSM

[Nik Conwell]

On Thu, 24 May 2007, Hans Moser wrote:

> Hi!
>
> Does anyone actually backup and restore Cyrus IMAPd with Tivoli Storage 
> Manager (TSM)?
>
> As far as my backup admin told me, the restore tool only shows file names, I 
> cannot see file content. So if user comes and tells
> "I lost my email x from user y, which arrived 2 weeks ago."
> I (obviously) cannot ask him about the filename. And cannot search the backup 
> store for user b's email address. :(
>
> A workaround would be to restore the complete folder to /tmp/ and grep there 
> for the right mail file. hm...

I have a prototype system I'm working on that does backups with TSM (via LVM 
snapshot).

For restores, I have a prototype script that restores the entire mailbox in 
question to a subdirectory of the user's main mailbox and names it 
RESTORE.MAILBOX.YYYYMMDD and then does a cyrus "reconstruct -r -f" to make the 
mailbox seen by cyrus.

The idea being that if somebody loses something, we restore the entire mailbox 
and the user can figure out what e-mails they want and can move them back to the 
right place themselves.  Something will automatically delete the 
RESTORE.MAILBOX.YYYYMMDD after a couple of days.

Eventually I plan on having a web GUI in front of the restore request and 
everything can happen automatically.

-nik