restore from cyrdump

[Willy Offermans]

Hello Patrick and Cyrus friends,

On Tue, Dec 09, 2014 at 02:27:09PM -0600, Patrick Goetz wrote:
> On 12/09/2014 09:36 AM, Bron Gondwana wrote:
> >> Is there nobody with a good suggestion?
> >
> > Not really.  Most people seem to be using LVM snapshots.
> 
> OK, I'll bite.  Since a  couple of times I've had to restore mail using 
> reconstruct after having lost all the metadata, I'm wondering what the 
> point is of either cyrdump or ctl_mboxlist list if you can't restore the 
> mail spool from their outputs?
> 
> What does cyrdump do, anyway?  I would expect it to also backup all the 
> metadata; else it amounts to tar'ing up ~/cyrus/user.
> 
> 
> ----
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It is indeed interesting to figure out that there is a tool to dump mail
data into a file, but there is no tool to perform the opposite. Can at
least someone point out the procedure how to restore the mail folder of
user.$USER from the cyrdump and ctl_mboxlist files? Are these files even
sufficient for a total restore?

I'm not sure what you mean with ``all the metadata'', but there are user 
flags saved into the cyrdump file as well. I never performed the whole 
cycle of dump and restore (probably nobody did so far), so I cannot tell 
you that all metadata is available in the dump file. See my question above!

I'm contemplating about the relevance of cyrdump and ctl_mboxlist route. Of
course the snapshot route or imapsync offer different and maybe easier
routes to achieve the same goal: Transfer mail data from server A to server
B, but maybe there are situations where cyrdump and ctl_mboxlist show their
merits. For example, if someone does not have the possibility to run an
imap server on server B.

But what is definitely missing in the cyrus-imapd documentation is a chapter 
about backup and restore. The possible different routes should be
addressed. It might be sufficient to draw the red line and refer to
different documentation. And if cyrdump-ctl_mboxlist-route is not (yet) the 
way to go, then please state this as well. It can save time and
frustration.


-- 
Met vriendelijke groeten,
With kind regards,
Mit freundlichen Gruessen,
De jrus wah,

Wiel

*************************************
 W.K. Offermans

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