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Restoring things the ugly way?

Offline ltwally

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Restoring things the ugly way?
« on: April 08, 2009, 12:47:00 AM »
Our SME box developed "issues" over the weekend - apparently the ClamAV daemon decided to stop all email.  So, our owner opted to reformat and reinstall.  Two backups were made - one a complete tar of /, and the other the server-manager's backup utility. 

Unfortunately, the server-manager copy appears to be corrupt... which leaves us with a copy of the old filesystem.

We have a couple folks using IMAP - including myself! - and I would dearly like to know where those old messages are stored and what it would take to copy them over to the new filesystem. 

I've already attempted copying /home/e-smith/files/users/ltwally/Maildir from the old filesystem to the new.  That didn't work so well... and it didn't appear to be anywhere near large enough to be the actual IMAP store.  :( 

Anyone out there with knowledge on how to perform this procedure?

Thanks!

Offline janet

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Re: Restoring things the ugly way?
« Reply #1 on: April 08, 2009, 04:01:53 AM »
ltwally

Well for a start you cannot have an account name starting with a capital letter, so maybe you should try copying

/home/e-smith/files/users/itwally/Maildir

After copying, did you change the permissions back to the user itwally, as I'm assuming you inadvertantly changed them to root during the copy process.

You really need to be much more specific regarding what the following means exactly:
"That didn't work so well... "
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Offline mercyh

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Re: Restoring things the ugly way?
« Reply #2 on: April 08, 2009, 04:58:17 PM »
I outlined the basic steps here:

http://forums.contribs.org/index.php/topic,42280.0.html

There are a bunch of warnings in this thread as far as what can and may go wrong.

BE AWARE, THIS IS A LAST RESORT EFFORT TO RESTORE DATA

Offline ltwally

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Re: Restoring things the ugly way?
« Reply #3 on: April 08, 2009, 05:17:03 PM »
ltwally

Well for a start you cannot have an account name starting with a capital letter, so maybe you should try copying

/home/e-smith/files/users/itwally/Maildir

This is a lower-case L:      l
This is an upper-case i:    I

;)

Quote
After copying, did you change the permissions back to the user itwally, as I'm assuming you inadvertantly changed them to root during the copy process.

I'll double-check.

Offline ltwally

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Re: Restoring things the ugly way?
« Reply #4 on: April 08, 2009, 05:40:44 PM »
I, erm, *cough* forgot to use the -R option on chown after moving Maildir.   :roll:


Thanks for the help, guys!

Offline janet

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Re: Restoring things the ugly way?
« Reply #5 on: April 08, 2009, 11:34:02 PM »
ltwally

Sorry, misread the font.
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