how to restore a backup of single mailbox/folder with many subfolders without disturbing the other mailboxes

[Adam Tauno Williams]

On Wed, 2010-03-10 at 07:06 -0400, Patrick Boutilier wrote:
> On 03/10/2010 06:52 AM, Robert Noll wrote:
> > Hi all,
> > i'd like to ask for advice on how to restore a backup of single mailbox
> > without disturbing the other mailboxes.
> > Let's say user albert deleted an important folder with many (100+,
> > hierarchy) subfolders accidentally.

If you enable delayed expunge you can save yourself a lot of this kind
of work.  This is one of the best features ever.

> > A complete system backup from yesterday evening is available,
> > but i don't want to restore the whole mail-system to the state of yesterday
> > because that would mean other users would loose anything that has
> > happened since then (sent, received etc)
> > Following some info i found,
> > i created a new mailbox folder for the user in the mailsystem
> > (albert/myrestore)  ,
> > restored the files from the backup system in there,
> > and ran   reconstruct -r albert/myrestore
> > while the mails directly inside the folder are now visible correctly,
> > the subfolders are not visible,
> > any idea how to solve this ?
> Try the -f option with reconstruct.
> -f     Examine the filesystem underneath mailbox, adding all directories 
> with a cyrus.header found there as new mailboxes.  Useful for
>                restoring mailboxes from backups.

It may not be necessary but I usually remove all permissions from the
folder except for the cyrus admin before I restore/reconstruct a folder.
Hopefully that will keep someone from trying to access the folder during
the operation; and harassing the help desk. 
-- 
Adam Tauno Williams <awilliam at whitemice.org> LPIC-1, Novell CLA
<http://www.whitemiceconsulting.com>
OpenGroupware, Cyrus IMAPd, Postfix, OpenLDAP, Samba