I ran into a situation where a service recipient had deleted their Zimbra sent folder. Zimbra NE allows me to restore the user’s account to another account just fine but then what do I do to get the mail folder over to the production account. I ended up spending the weekend coding an automated restore. Right now it is very “alpha” but I thought I had better share my code with people out there who are hurting like I was. [download: http://www.troyadams.ca/code/zmcopyfolder]

For mini mock disaster (simulation) we will:

• backup
• mutilate a folder
• restore

This is documentation is an account of the disaster simulation that I demonstrated to one of my service recipients. I ran a full backup on his account, and then asked him to delete the /z folder, and then runto me screaming about it.

The backup:

[10:30 root@avocado ~] # su zimbra -c 'zmbackup --fullBackup --account user@mydomain.com'
full-20071221.173957.494
[10:39 root@avocado ~] # su zimbra -c 'zmbackupquery' | head -8
Label:   full-20071221.173957.494
Type:    full
Status:  completed
Started: Fri Dec 21 10:39:57 MST 2007
Ended:   Fri Dec 21 10:39:59 MST 2007
Redo log sequence range: 526 .. 526
Number of accounts: 1

[10:40 root@avocado ~] #

Oh look, a user just walked in and said “help, I’ve deleted the Zed folder!” Let’s take a look:

[10:47 root@avocado ~] # zmmailbox -z -m user search -l 20 -t mess 'in:z'
ERROR: mail.NO_SUCH_FOLDER (no such folder path: /z)
[11:10 root@avocado ~] #

Okay, it’s gone. Now we restore the account to restored_user@mydomain.com:

[11:10 root@avocado ~] # su zimbra -c 'zmrestore --createAccount --prefix restored_ --restoreFullBackupOnly --account user@mydomain.com'
[11:11 root@avocado ~] #
[11:12 root@avocado ~] # zmmailbox -z -m restored_user search -l 3 -t mess 'in:z'
num: 3, more: true

Id  Type   From                  Subject                                             Date
-----  ----   --------------------  --------------------------------------------------  --------------
1. 18912  mess   Trent                 Re: discard_emails_for_the_day                      12/16/07 01:40
2. 18907  mess   Jan                   Re: Free to good home corner computer               12/14/07 18:10
3. 18914  mess   Kathy                 admin auth passwords                                12/14/07 15:15

[11:12 root@avocado ~] #

Next, we run zmcopyfolder to get the mail folder to the production account:

[11:13 root@avocado ~] # time bin/zmcopyfolder --source restored_user@avocado.cs.mydomain.com:/z
> --destination user@avocado.cs.mydomain.com:/z --noverify --verbose --forks 16
source:      restored_user@avocado.cs.mydomain.com:/z
destination: user@avocado.cs.mydomain.com:/z
zmcopyfolder: source target contains 49 messages
zmcopyfolder: copying...
QUEUED   1 of 49
QUEUED   2 of 49
QUEUED   3 of 49
QUEUED   4 of 49
QUEUED   5 of 49
QUEUED   6 of 49
QUEUED   7 of 49
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QUEUED   10 of 49
QUEUED   11 of 49
QUEUED   12 of 49
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QUEUED   15 of 49
QUEUED   16 of 49
DEQUEUED  1 of 49
QUEUED   17 of 49
DEQUEUED  2 of 49
QUEUED   18 of 49
DEQUEUED  3 of 49
QUEUED   19 of 49
DEQUEUED  4 of 49
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DEQUEUED  5 of 49
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DEQUEUED  6 of 49
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DEQUEUED  7 of 49
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DEQUEUED  9 of 49
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DEQUEUED  11 of 49
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DEQUEUED  12 of 49
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DEQUEUED  13 of 49
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DEQUEUED  15 of 49
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DEQUEUED  16 of 49
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DEQUEUED  17 of 49
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DEQUEUED  18 of 49
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DEQUEUED  19 of 49
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DEQUEUED  21 of 49
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DEQUEUED  22 of 49
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DEQUEUED  23 of 49
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DEQUEUED  24 of 49
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DEQUEUED  26 of 49
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DEQUEUED  27 of 49
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DEQUEUED  28 of 49
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DEQUEUED  29 of 49
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DEQUEUED  30 of 49
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DEQUEUED  31 of 49
QUEUED   47 of 49
DEQUEUED  32 of 49
QUEUED   48 of 49
DEQUEUED  33 of 49
QUEUED   49 of 49
zmcopyfolder: done copying.
zmcopyfolder: destination target contains 49 messages:

real    3m36.798s
user    11m51.627s
sys     0m31.335s
[11:17 root@avocado ~] #
[11:17 root@avocado ~] # zmmailbox -z -m user search -l 3 -t mess 'in:z'
num: 3, more: true

Id  Type   From                  Subject                                             Date
-----  ----   --------------------  --------------------------------------------------  --------------
1. 18976  mess   Trent                 Re: discard_emails_for_the_day                      12/16/07 01:40
2. 18984  mess   Jan                   Re: Free to good home corner computer               12/14/07 18:10
3. 18979  mess   Kathy                 admin auth passwords                                12/14/07 15:15

[11:18 root@avocado ~] #

It looks like that worked just fine.

Later on, the user said everything looked good!

I hope this helps!

cheers,

Troy