Re: restoring

[Rich Graves <rgraves@carleton.edu>]

Yeah, losing "delayed expunge" (for Cyrus people) and "Dumpster" (for Exchange people) is a significant downside for Zimbra.

There are a few RFEs for individual message/mailbox restore. In the mean time, some ways to deal:

1) Keep /opt/zimbra on a SAN with daily read/write snapshots (we use Compellent here). Mount the old snapshot on a Xen VM configured identically to the production server, save IP address (or possibly the same IP address, isolated with some sort of NAT). The missing data can be moved with an IMAP client or REST URLs.

2) As you suggest, do a point-in-time restore of the entire account. As the specific case warrants, either give the user access to the restored account (zmprov md example.edu zimbraAuthFallbackToLocal TRUE allows setting a local password when primary authentication is LDAP/Kerberos) or copy the item from the restored to production account via IMAP or REST.

3) Instruct people not to empty Trash anymore. Leave it to the automated purge interval.

4) Consider a rolling archive of *all* incoming and outgoing email by setting always_bcc in postfix config. Probably not very practical for larger sites.

We do 1, 2, and 3.
-- 
Rich Graves http://claimid.com/rcgraves
Carleton.edu Sr UNIX and Security Admin
CMC135: 507-222-7079 Cell: 952-292-6529