Restoring after Accidental E-mail Lifetime setting

[mlategan]

Hi there. I hope someone can help me on this one. Zimbra version is network 5.0.9 GA.

Someone accidentally set the e-mail lifetime setting on our customer's default COS to 90 days, causing all e-mail older than 90 days to be purged. Which, obviously was not what was intended with the setting. Instead they were trying to tell Zimbra to keep messages for 90 days after deletion.

But now the mail is gone. We do have backups dating back far enough for us to recover the data.

But how do I go about getting the old mail back without losing the current mail that entered the system in the period from where the purge happened up to today?

[bdial]

i can't give you exact instructions as i've never done this (although i imagine one day i'll have to) but what you need to do is restore the account, then apply the redologs to the account. basically zimbra keeps a record of everything thats happened to a mailbox since it was last backed up. this is whats backed up when you do incrementals. so if you restore to say this morning at 7am, you just tell it to apply the redologs from 7am til now. you can probably find instructions by searching the forums i'm sure it's been explained or maybe someone else who's done this will chime in.

EDIT: will the redologs cause everything ot be deleted again? hrm i'm not sure

[mlategan]

Thank you bdial. That was my first thought too, but I think (and that means, am probably wrong) that the redo logs will require that things happen in sequence, and therefor will require the delete operations too. Not sure either, though. Has anyone out there ever tried this?

I have a solution that I know will work: Setting up a temporary virtual zimbra server somewhere, restoring a backup that contains all the old mail to it, and then imapsyncing from it to the live server. But would love an easier method of getting deleted mail back for future administration.

Does anyone know of an easier method of recovering deleted mail, or can anyone confirm that bdial's method works in production?

Any ideas will be greatly appreciated.

[mlategan]

Originally Posted by Samson.Real5

Well try to make a copy of old email and new email keep backups of both old and new mails. Because there is limitation which are written on terms and conditions. So try this you will get easily.

John
spam url removed

Hi John,

Thank you for your reply. I am sorry, but I am not sure what you mean. Could you please elaborate a little more?