[SOLVED] How NOT to do backup of Open Source Edition. Is there recovery?

[bbrooking]

It would seem it is possible to be inundated with backup solutions for Zimbra Open Source Edition and still manage to muck it up. In the course of attempting to upgrade/reinstall a ZCS 5.0.25 for Ubuntu 8.0.4 I managed in a fit of infinite wisdom to move the files to a USB drive before wiping the hard disk. I did not properly tar up the folders first and the FAT32 drive of course does not support the symbolic links and permissions.

I have searched for this problem in the forums and haven't had success in finding a clear solution. When I try to follow the restore methods laid out in these forums I am running into odd errors. I did manually restore the symbolic links in the topmost directory. I have installed ZCS 5.0.25 fresh and then replaced the /opt/zimbra folder.

The specific error message I am currently up against on attempting to start up Zimbra services is:

FAILED
/opt/zimbra/bin/zmlocalconfig: line 53: exec: java: not found

Followed by some other messages. I'm a bit frustrated because I have the message store intact. If there is a manual method for importing the message store for each individual user, this is a possibility. The install is only about 12 users with around 4 GB total messages.

Any help would be greatly appreciated. Thank you.

[iway]

Sounds like the symlink to the java directory is wrong/missing.

[bbrooking]

Originally Posted by iway

Sounds like the symlink to the java directory is wrong/missing.

Well, not missing at the /opt/zimbra level. There may be links further down that I'm not finding.

lrwxrwxrwx 1 zimbra zimbra 11 Nov 24 14:09 java -> jdk1.5.0_19
drwxr-xr-x 7 zimbra zimbra 4096 Nov 24 14:07 jdk1.5.0_19

Thanks, though.

[bbrooking]

Well in a step closer to disaster recovery success, I found the java error was occurring because the files in the /opt/zimbra/jdk1.5.0_19/bin directory were not set 'executable'. I've rectified this for the files in that folder and all the other /bin, /sbin and /libexec directories I found.

Now I'm stuck trying to get LDAP running. This error is repeated 7 times:

ERROR: ld.so: object '/opt/zimbra/tcmalloc/lib/libtcmalloc_minimal.so' from LD_PRELOAD cannot be preloaded: ignored.
/opt/zimbra/openldap/libexec/slapd: error while loading shared libraries: /opt/zimbra/openldap-2.3.43.10z/lib/libldap_r-2.3.so.0: invalid ELF header

Followed by:

Failed to start slapd. Attempting debug start to determine error.
/opt/zimbra/openldap/libexec/slapd: error while loading shared libraries: /opt/zimbra/openldap-2.3.43.10z/lib/libldap_r-2.3.so.0: invalid ELF header

I'm not having much luck with this error, I'm afraid. Is this familiar to anyone?

Thanks.

[odeleon]

I've never faced a situation like this but I can offer one suggestion.

Do a "software-only" type of install using the same ZCS version as your backup and overwrite the directories where Zimbra stores data (/opt/zimbra/store , /opt/zimbra/data/ and others). This should restore all your links and file permissions.

[bbrooking]

In the interest of expediency I have accepted a partial victory. I performed a fresh installation of Zimbra and created the user accounts (as previously mentioned there are less than a dozen accounts). I snooped into messages in each of the message store directories to identify which branches were associated with which users. I then injected the messages into a Recovery folder in the new accounts according to "Method 1" in this post. The users will have to reconfigure their settings and address books cannot be recovered, but their email history is intact.

On a related note, my personal account on this server was not lost because I was using Zimbra Desktop 2.0. I made sure NOT to create an account on the new server with the same username/password as I previously had (or the sync would wipe out the local offline cache) but rather created a temporary account. From there I could copy folders, contacts, etc. all without losing the metadata like tags to the temporary account. The process is tedious but worthwhile to me.

Thanks to everyone for their assistance.