Funny/Complicated Data Restore Problem

[raptor1010001]

Got a little problem with a friend of mine's old Zimbra installation. Many years ago another tech set up a mail server (RAID1) and installed Gentoo with a chrooted Debian 3.1 (presumeably--/etc/debian_version says squeeze/sid) and a Zimbra 4.0.5 installation.

Since then the drives have encountered bad sectors and left the system unrecoverable. I do have a tarball backup from the last time it was running well enough to perform a backup. Now the goal is to get the old Zimbra data out of the backup.

The tarball backup appears to be of the entire chrooted Debian environment so the question I'm posting here is:

How can I restore the Zimbra data from this backup into the new, built-from-scratch Zimbra 6.0.4 environment that I implemented back in December? I haven't had much luck finding a solution on my own or searching for some clues as what to do. Any suggestions?

[gnyce]

You don't say if the tarball includes a zimbra backup, OR is a tarball of the Zimbra installation. Regardless - and this is not my area of expertise - but I would guess your best bet is to setup a zimbra 4.05 installation and try to restore the tarball to that. Then you can slowly upgrade from 4.05 to 5.x something to 6.x, and then maybe do a zimbra-to-zimbra migration to your new/scratch-built setup.

[bdial]

you cannot restore a 4.x backup to a 6.x.

you would need to install 4.x again and resdtore to that

[raptor1010001]

Sorry, yeah, the tarball includes a backup of the entire Zimbra directory--/opt/zimbra. I have tried to install Zimbra 4.0.5 and then restore the directory over top of the /opt/zimbra, but have had less than successful results..