mailbox migration/repair question

[Andrew Morgan]

On Wed, 17 Feb 2010, Joe Vieira wrote:

> Hi,
>
> So, We have an imap volume (ext3) that doesn't seem to come back up 
> clean after a few crashes.  fsck is a mess.  Shows clean; mount it; 30 
> minutes later it's throwing errors and needs to be fsck'd again.  (any 
> ideas about that i'd love to hear)
>
> So I am considering in the interest of getting these students back using 
> email, setting up a new volume, mount it as the same imap partition and 
> creating "shell" mailboxes for all the users on it, basically an empty 
> mailbox that I can let them log into, send and receive new mail, etc. 
> I was thinking about doing this by making the simple directory structure 
> for all the users then doing a reconstruct to make the cyrus.* files. 
> The plan would then be to restore from backup (or the corrupt drive in 
> read only). My concern however is that the UID of the messages will get 
> duplicated.  Basically does this idea make ANY sense to you guys?  Will 
> it work?  Other ideas?

One of those cyrus.* files should contain the max UID - I can't remember 
which.  If you can restore/copy that across, it should (I think) number 
any new messages starting from there.  Then you can restore/copy the 
original messages across later.

I've never tried this before, so I may be getting it wrong.  Hopefully 
someone with more in-depth knowledge of Cyrus can comment.

 	Andy