Possible to restore a certain folder only?

[strafford]

Hi

We have just migrated to Zimbra. Our entire machine gets backed up nightly.

But what I would like to do is also keep a local backup of the entire Zimbra directory for restoring folders or emails accidentally deleted fro shared folders.

My questions are:

1. Is it possible to restore a certain folder or set of folders w/o restoring the entire Zimbra directory (don't want to restore over users folders since they continually receive mail that would then be lost)?

2. Is there a backup method (something like on of the open source backup methods listed here) that would better facilitate this?

Thanks,
Scott

[Hivos]

As far as I know: in case you need a particular email or folder you can restore the entire mailbox to another account, e.g. restored_accountname@example.com instead of accountname@example.com. Then simply share a folder with the victim and drag&drop the lost email(s).

[ewilen]

Hivos, I think you're answering in the context of NETWORK edition. Strafford has FOSS according to his profile.

Strafford, I assume you are downing Zimbra before doing your nightly backup. That's a baseline absolute "must" unless you have implemented something exotic.

However if you do something like this, you may be able to forego downing the server. Or at least, the concept could be used to provide backups of individual folders, as a supplement to making a backup of all of ZCS. The basic idea is to script using the built-in account-level Export feature.

These will help you get started with what you'd need to do: ZCS 6.0:Zimbra REST API Reference:Export Mailbox - Zimbra :: Wiki
ZCS 6.0:Zimbra REST API Reference - Zimbra :: Wiki

Basically, I think you could use

zmmailbox -z -m <mailbox name> getRestURL "?fmt=zip" > <filename.zip>

to backup each mailbox. You could use tgz instead of zip if you like. Then you use

zmmailbox -z -m <mailbox name> postRestURL "?fmt=zip" <filename.zip>

to restore a given account. Probably you'll want to create a dummy account to restore to, and then share whatever folder has the data you want to recover. Alternatively you could try doing folder-specific restores, or you could do folder-by folder backups for each account.

I can't promise this will be economical either in time or disk space.