Restore from Backup Conundrum

[quietas]

Here's the situation, it's complicated.

Server was dying rapidly. I back up to an external USB drive on Friday. All seemed to recover and worked all weekend. Server died about 4am Monday morning. Crap.

Bonus though, I had set up a desktop (purloined from a hapless user) with Ubuntu server and Zimbra. Poof, viola, instant mail server. Crappy, but it works while Dell builds me a new one.

Backups copying a 60gb tar.bz2 file takes a friggin long time over the network. (Craptastic desktop has fried USB ports, someone stuck crap in upside down. Note: beat user with LART later.) In the end the backup was restored by the end of the day. All is well. Slow, but functional.

As of today I managed to get the Monday backups off of the server. All is good there.

Here's persnickety bit (LOL, Firefox has persnickety in it's spellcheck dictionary). 1) Backups to USB were from Friday. 2) Server was restored with Friday backups on Monday. 3) All Emails from Friday after backup until server crash Monday morning are not live.

How would I integrate backup from last Monday into today's live server, all the while retaining both sets of data?

Better yet, if possible, can I also retain the current location so as to not have duplicate messages?

[quietas]

No one has an idea on how I would go about merging two backups?

[iway]

Just a thought, don't know if it really works: You could make a backup of the new server, restore the old backup on the new server and then restore the new backup as well.

[quietas]

Tried that also. It used to be bugged so that when you restored over an existing account it would just overwrite the files. The current incarnation wipes the account clean and restores it from the backup.

Optimal would be to have an option to merge, overwrite, or obliterate the existing account.

[dwmtractor]

This is a total WAG and I have no idea the chances of failure/success, but how about using either IMAPSYNC or just IMAP clients logged into accounts on both machines, and dragging the messages from old-slow-junk over to new-hot-pretty?

[cmcbride]

While not exactly the same scenario, I kind ran into this. I had a situation where we setup all new mailboxes for a 60 users under a new domain. Turns out they didnt want to lose all their old mailbox info. So now I had 2 mailboxes per user, one with old mail in it and one with a week or so of mail in it. Since these were on the same server, I was able to share one mailbox with another, login into one mailbox and drag messages from one mailbox into the other to merge them.

Support did get back to me (long after I'd already done my drag and drop fix) and gave me this information:

Starting with zcs version 5.0.9, you can use the *zmmailbox* command line utility to export an entire mailbox in .tgz format.
You can import the exported file to a new account. You should have options to deal with duplicates as well.

Please consult this wiki for usage and let us know if you have any questions
ZCS-to-ZCS Migrations » Zimbra :: Blog

Maybe that'll help. good luck.

[ewilen]

Perhaps you could restore the "not live" data into new accounts using the option to add a prefix to the original names, then create shares from account to account as cmcbride suggests. You might not have enough licenses to do everyone at once, though.