How to restore emails for an account from backup

[valentinmitoiu]

Hello,

I have a little problem with an account...a user deleted his all his emails by mistake and now he wants them back.

I have copied them from the backup in /opt/zimbra/store/0/id/ but they are now showing in his email.

What do I have to do so they show up in his email account ?

Thank you

[LaFong]

Hello,

I have a little problem with an account...a user deleted his all his emails by mistake and now he wants them back.

I have copied them from the backup in /opt/zimbra/store/0/id/ but they are now showing in his email.

What do I have to do so they show up in his email account ?

The emails will not show up if you do not restore or recreate the database references to them. You can add his emails back, or restore his entire account. You, and he, will need to do some work. This kind of thing is much easier if you also do MySQL and LDAP backups, or have the $ NE version.

If you have the Dumpster feature enabled, he might be able to recover recent emails.

[SOLVED] Yet Another Backup Script for Community Version

[SOLVED] Yet Another Backup Script for Community Version

[valentinmitoiu]

The server is backed-up using zimbraColdBackup.pl, could I use zmlmtpinject to inject the messages into that mailbox ?

[LaFong]

The server is backed-up using zimbraColdBackup.pl, could I use zmlmtpinject to inject the messages into that mailbox ?

Yes, except that none of the message dates will be right. They will all default to the date you inject them. In the restore folder post above, I have a script to copy the Date header to "X-Zimbra-Received", so the dates will be right when you zmlmtpinject.

Another approach, for someone with lots of mail and folders, is to create a temp Zimbra server on another machine or VM, restore to it from your cold backup, export the user's data within the GUI to a tgz file, then import that tgz file into your real server, perhaps to a temp user. Share the temp user's folders, then the person can just copy them to their account.

[valentinmitoiu]

Yep, I used the script but the dates haven't been added correctly to the messages. Everything else is ok. I will try to adopt a new backup method instead of zimbraColdBackup to avoid things like this in the future.

Thank you once again for the help.

[LaFong]

The script I referenced does work, if used as shown. It has been tested many times. You can check the individual .msg files for X-Zimbra-Received in the header. The other script may work as well, but it, like mine, does not inject messages. That is done by separate commands.