Messages in store not appearing in users mailbox - post disaster

[thajzi]

I inherited a Zimbra server which I must proudly say has never given me cause to spend any time on these forums, until this weekend - (and it wasn't Zimbra's fault). My Zimbra is running on a Fedora client on a VMWare server. This Friday, the VMWare host reported a failed disk in the raid, and while I was transferring the Zimbra machine to another server, I had a second drive fail.

I wasn't overly concerned because of the backup routines that have been in place since prior to my inheriting the system. The VM Appliance is shutdown and backed up every weekend, and /opt/zimbra/store is backed up every night. I grabbed the backup of the appliance and brought it online, stopped Zimbra, restored the /opt/zimbra/store file structure and started Zimbra back up.

This is where I became confused. When I log in as any user, not counting new email, the newest that was showing was from the previous week. I went into the store directory and could see the messages that weren't showing in the user interface.

I have already tried re-indexing my account to see if that would resolve the issue. It didn't. Is there something else I can do to make these messages appear? And as a secondary question, what files are truly critical to backup beyond the message store?

[gnyce]

if I had to guess, it would be that with your nightly backup of /opt/zimbra/store you are not getting the mysql dbs for the metadata and such, under /opt/zimbra/db/data. Thus, you only see items in the UI from the last store-and-db backup... See here:
ZCS System Architecture - Zimbra :: Wiki

Perchance, in your structure, is there anything in /opt/zimbra/backup/sessions ?

[thajzi]

Thanks for responding so quick. The only thing that is backed up nightly is the /opt/zimbra/store file structure. Everything else on the server is exactly how it was from the previous week.

After reviewing the information in your link, I tried to bring back up the corrupt VM Appliance. The files that it looks like I need to resolve this are located in /opt/zimbra/db/data/zimbra/. They all test clean.

Now as a follow-up question. The replacement 'server' has been up now for the better part of the weekend and has new email already processed. Is there a way for me to merge the various dbs so I am not left with the choice of either messages A (last weeks) or messages B (this weekend)? The stores are already in sync.