[SOLVED] Regarding Network Edition Backup and Restore

[bhwong]

Hi,

Let me know if my assumption is correct. The network edition contain a daily backup that will backup everything, including calendar, tasklist, documents and briefcase. And a new backup will always replace previous day backup.

This mean if a file is deleted today, the file can still be recover from yesterday backup, but if the next backup get activated, the file will be gone for good. Am I right?

Also, is it possible to restore just a file from the backup or the whole account will be completely replaced by yesterday backup?

Thanks,
Boon Hong.

[bdial]

i think the default backup schedule is to run a full backup on friday, and then an incremental backup every other day. This doesn not overwrite any previous backups. So on friday it backs up everything belonging to every account. Then saturday it only backs up what has changed since the friday backup ran. Then sunday it backs up what's changed since the saturday incrmeental ran, and so on and so on. Then the following friday it will repeat the cycle. It will not overwrite hte previous backup though. So you will have full backups for the past 2 weeks.

When you go to restore you can restore an account to any time as long as you have the corresponding full backup and incrementals leading up to the target date. So say it's thursday, and you need to restore an account to how it was on wednesday. You need the full backup from friday as well as th e incremental backups for sat, sun, mon & tuesday. By default you'll have them in your /opt/zimbra/backup and the restore utility will find them

you only have 2 options when restoring an account. restore it to the original username, or restore it to a different username. If you're restoring a deleted user then usually you'll use the first option, but if you're trying to restore maybe deleted data from an active user you won't want to do the first option because they'll lose anything they got after the date you restore them to. So you'd want to restore to another account and then get whatever you need from that other account and then delete it.

[y@w]

No, backups don't overwrite each other. If you go into /opt/zimbra/backup, there should be a backup for each day of the last 30 days. By default, Zimbra keeps 30 days worth of backups.

Backup and Restore

Unfortunately, you do have to restore a full account, not just an item from their mailbox. I was pretty sure that there's an open bug for supporting restoring individual items out of a backed-up mailbox but I can't seem to find it.

[bdial]

Originally Posted by y@w

Unfortunately, you do have to restore a full account, not just an item from their mailbox. I was pretty sure that there's an open bug for supporting restoring individual items out of a backed-up mailbox but I can't seem to find it.

Bug 8849 – More Granular Restore: per folder & per-message

[bhwong]

Thanks for the replies. So how long does the backup keep? 2 weeks or 30 days?

I checked the backup log and notice that Zimbra actually do full and incremental backup quite randomly. Sometimes it will do full backup with a few incremental backup in between, sometimes it will do full backup the next day after a full backup without any incremental backup. Is there a way that we can control this backup process?

[bdial]

zimbra will do a full backup when a new user is added. so if you add a new user on tuesday it will do a full of that user and an incremental of every other user

[LMStone]

And if you just need to restore one or two emails, restore the mailbox to a new mailbox, forward the desired emails to the current mailbox, and then delete the restored mailbox.

Hope that helps,
Mark

[bhwong]

Thanks for all the great answers!

I will vote for the bug 8849.