Recovery From Backup of DB and Store . . .

[rwc101010]

So, after recovering from a drive crash on top of a corrupted mirrorset, I'm left with a somewhat intact copy of the /opt/zimbra directory. Within the salvaged data, is a clean and mountable version of the Zimbra database files (/opt/zimbra/db/ - confirmed clean with table checks after mount) and a somewhat complete version of the store (/opt/zimbra/store/ - noticed a few corrupt files, but the majority is there).

I've run the restore as indicated in the wiki - including a re-install of the same version of ZCS over the top of the restored /opt/zimbra/ directory - this results in a somewhat broken install with what appears to be major LDAP problems.

So, time for plan Q . . .

I'm looking for any hints or tips drawn from the vast experience in the community, that may help me on the way to recovering user messages and address books to a fresh install of Zimbra.

There seems to be a number of articles here on recovery with just the /opt/zimbra/store/ directory (which I still haven't ruled out as a last resort), and the whole /opt/zimbra/ directory (which doesn't work in my case) . . . but it would seem that no one has attempted to (or at least posted about it within the forum) restore from the DB and the Store backups.

A few stats on the install:

- ZCS Version: 4.5.1 Open Source
- OS Version: CentOS 4.4
- System contains approximately 25 mail accounts over about 10 domains.

So, anyone up for the challenge? I can provide any additional information as needed.

Thank you in advance!

Robert

[jholder]

what kind of ldap problems?

I'm on my pda, so I don't recall if this has been covered in another thread.

-john

[rwc101010]

Hi John! Thanks for the quick response!

The main issue I encountered was a failure of Tomcat (and all services that run on it) shortly after Zimbra startup (Tomcat starts, but fail shortly after - resulting logs are inconclusive).

Upon digging into what logs were generated, and following some of the threads in the forum, I came across a number of possible fixes . . . which led to even more errors which indicated an inconsistent failure to communicate with the LDAP server.

At the point of writing the post, I had given up on recovering the install, so started down the path of recovering the data. I'll reinstall the recovered server and post my recovery steps and the resulting logs. I would love to recover the install and all the data intact of course, but am prepared for less.

Thanks for the assistance!

Robert

[brained]

In the past I've had to deal with a corrupted LDAP and restored from an older backup. The older backup was missing a few accounts that had been created after it. Simply using the admin GUI to remake those accounts (in the same order as before) resulted in those account not only existing again but in having their full message store and status and contacts available.

[jholder]

Originally Posted by rwc101010

The main issue I encountered was a failure of Tomcat (and all services that run on it) shortly after Zimbra startup (Tomcat starts, but fail shortly after - resulting logs are inconclusive).

That sounds like a log permissions issue. Have you checked to see if they're actually being written to? If they arn't, then check the permissions. You should be able to fix this by:
su -root
chown -R zimbra:zimbra /opt/zimbra
cd /opt/zimbra/libexec
./zmfixperms

Upon digging into what logs were generated, and following some of the threads in the forum, I came across a number of possible fixes . . . which led to even more errors which indicated an inconsistent failure to communicate with the LDAP server.

There are several kinds of communication failures. The only time that I would say that you might have a serious issue, is if the error code is 80, with an internal error. Most others are recoverable.

At the point of writing the post, I had given up on recovering the install, so started down the path of recovering the data. I'll reinstall the recovered server and post my recovery steps and the resulting logs. I would love to recover the install and all the data intact of course, but am prepared for less.

Don't ever give up until you give us a shot at it.
Let's see some logs.

-john

[rwc101010]

I apologize for the lack of updates.

So far I've been unable to restore the system to the point where I can recreate the same errors that I originally reported (even after following my own notes - oops). I've received such a random set of errors, I think there's far more wrong with my backups than previously thought.

For recovery, I've gone the zmlmtpinject route and recovered user mail manually - which worked pretty well.

At this point I'm no longer in need of assistance on this thread.

The major lesson to be taken from the experience, stop when you get an error and post here, maybe someone else has a solution!

Thanks for all your assistance!

Robert