Restore a users mail box from a full backup

[phil]

I've been backing up Scalix religiously for at least a year every night, by shutting it down, making a tar file of the whole directory, restarting Scalix and then running a tape backup.

But of course, I never practiced restoring anything until now - when I need to.

One of my users has lost a whole load of data from his inbox, calendar, sent items, etc.

I've untared the backup where I think all the data is good, but can't find instructions on how to restore just this one users data from a full directory backup. There's lots on how to restore if I'd have backed up the mailboxes specifically, and some stuff on how to restore the data had I done something specific on copying a database with a specific time stamp.

Of course after this I'll modify my backup strategy, but now I just need to get this data back.

Thanks in advance.

PS I'm a bit behind the times on version 11.0.4.25

[LeslieW]

If you have a disaster recovery system, restore to the DR system and do an sxmboxexp of his account.

If you don't have a DR system, save this user's v8, 01, 02, 03, 04, and 05 files for safe keeping. This is just in case something goes wrong and we need to undo everything and get back to where we were before we started.
1. omshowu -n <user name> -f
2. Look for the User Folder, i.e.
User Folder : ~/user03/g0001ea/00000v8:1
3. cd /var/opt/scalix/??/s/user??/g???
use the user and g directories appropriate for your user
4. Save the 00000v8, 0000001, 0000002, etc. files to a safe place

Do an sxmboxexp of the account.

Now restore the 00000v8, 0000001, 0000002, etc. files from the backup. This will restore old pointers to items that existed before they were all deleted. Note that you will lose any items that arrived since the backup was made. That's why you made the sxmboxexp.

Now run omscan against the account; it should report tons of missing children. Those are the items that no longer exist on disk.
omscan -Avx -U <user name>

Restore the missing children from the backup.
Run omscan again and restore missing children.
Run omscan again and restore missing children.
Do this until omscan no longer reports missing children.

Now if you want to you can recover the messages that arrived since the backup was made. Do this by running sxmboximp against the archive file created with sxmboxexp.

[phil]

Thanks for the reply - I'll let you know how I get on.