Extracting mail after server failure
Rudy Gevaert
Rudy.Gevaert at UGent.be
Mon Oct 21 14:01:23 EDT 2013
Quoting Michael Smith <ms at tribeca.com>, Mon, 21 Oct 2013:
> My mail server suffered multiple hardware failures because of electrical
> problems.
>
> Fortunately I had a backup of the mail store (but not the server config) on
> a disk which I was able to mount and copy to another host.
>
> At this point I'm just trying to export the mail so I can import it into an
> imap client.
>
> Is there a simple way to read the cyrus-imap mail store, or do I need to
> configure a new server?
Hi Michael, years ago I had a similar problem :(.
You can use reconstruct to recreate the mailboxes.db file. However in
case of many TB of data this can take too long. But note the
following options to reconstruct
-f Examine the filesystem underneath mailbox, adding all directo-
ries with a cyrus.header found there as new mailboxes. Useful
for restoring mailboxes from backups.
-s Don't stat underlying files. This makes reconstruct run faster,
at the expense of not noticing some issues (like zero byte files
or size mistmatches). "reconstruct -s" should be quite fast.
In my case, I don't think -s existed then, I used 'find' to get a list
all the mailboxes and used a script to create the mailboxes.db
contents as a text file. I then converted that txt file to the db
file with one of the tools that comes with cyrus. (ctl_dbtool). The
only catch is that the txt file needs to have a tab at the end of the
line (or something like that.)
Good luck!
Rudy
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Rudy Gevaert e-mail: Rudy.Gevaert at UGent.be
Directie ICT, Afdeling Infrastructuur
Groep Systemen tel: +32 9 264 4750
Universiteit Gent fax: +32 9 264 4994
Krijgslaan 281, gebouw S9, 9000 Gent, Belgie www.UGent.be
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