Topic: Manually importing(restoring/recovering) files after a crash

[norman969]

so this started when i first installed sme i was very happy and it served me very well with fetch mail, unfortuently i was yet to setup a backup routine and was trying to setup another harddrive to be everybodys home drive and while using the mkfs command i was actually working on the main drive.

allthogh i didnn't loose any of the data on the main drive SME wouldnt boot it had some problems with the kernal and the file system... so what i did is i backed up ALL the data to another hard drive and installed sme server again and i was sposed to copy some of the stuff from the old hard drive.

 so as planeed i first backed up the home folder on the new installation and then replaced it with the home folder from the old drive that has all the mail, server copy roamin profiles ect. but it DIDNT seem to work, i tried setting on one of the client IMAP and it wasn't even able to read the folders on the server. and when i went into Quotas in the server manager it showed that all of the profiles take less the 1 MB which wasn't true oviously.

so what i am asking help with is :
+ is there a way of manually restoring files ie. copy folders ... .... ...
+ if there is no way of doing that, is it possible to start everything again but just copy the maildir for all users (4 users in total)

and that is pretty much it so far.
if anyone has MSN and is willing to help my msn is: norman969@msn.com

thanks alot Daniel

[cc_skavenger]

Have you tried running the install again and telling the system that it is an upgrade.  Might fix the problem.

Just a thought.

[norman969]

thanks for the idea, ill try it.
edit:

i tried inserting the SME cd and it booted from it. but i get an eror :

the installer has found a previous installation that might be a SME server installation, but encountered the following eror while trying to verify the installation:

Eror mounting device hdc1 as /files: no such device or address

this most likely means this partition has not been formatted.

press ok to reboot your system.

if you want to perform a fresh install, type "more option" in the feild below.



so i tried typing more options but then it continues as if there is nothing currently installed(i think so, it doesnt give me any upgrading options

[norman969]

doesn't matter i was wrong on this one..

so i am not able to do a reinstall.
what i am doing now is installing it again the other hard disk and keeping the origianl one with all the files.

so i would like to know, is it possible to just copy the mail dirs for the users and that they will see their mail ????


cheers Daniel

[norman969]

ok. so now i am at the stage in which i finished reinstalling SME and copying ONLY the mail to (/home/e-smith/files/users/****/Maildir). the problem appering to me is that when i setup imap acount on the client it sees the folder for example "ebay" but i gives me an eror in outlook express and doesnt show up in webmail.

so i guess there is something i need to do to all the files in the original Maildir folder, if someone can help doing whatever needs to be done to the mail files i will apriciate it.

cheers Daniel

[cc_skavenger]

What I would do, since it is only four users, is create the accounts.  You can always set the password back to what they had later.  I would then copy the files back to the users folders, I would not copy the folder, themselves.  Also, make sure that the file permissions are intact.  They should be for the user, not root or admin.  They should be username:username and 0600.  I checked this on my server.

HTH

[norman969]

are you sure it would work?

so create an acount and before resetting the password copy all the content of Maildir under the acount of who ever it is?

[cc_skavenger]

I would set the password.  I really don't think that it matters, but I would set it anyway.

[norman969]

well thanks guys i was actually making some small mistakes. but it's finally working.