Restore mailbox without restoring PO? 3

[maxthedork]

Is there a way to restore the contents of a mailbox, or allow a user to restore the contents of their mailbox selectively (as with the Restore Point) without restoring the entire PO? We've only got 51GB of available space to restore to but the PO is over 60GB. I've done restores to mailboxes in the past but it's always been by restoring the entire PO to another location and then setting the restore point so the user can go into the backup and restore their own email. I'm not trying to mass-restore the entire mailbox just a few items that got deleted.

Thanks in advance (-:

 

[terry712]

need the po

mount a usb drive on the box as temp?

 

[marvhuffaker]

The reason you have to restore the entire post office is because the "Blob" files are distributed across about 128 directories, and this applies to all users. You can't identify which files go to which users just by looking at the files. The post office indexes all of the files and knows where they are at and how to get them when it needs them.

Another option is to have another server that the post office can access. Assuming Netware, the PO can make an NCP connection to the other Netware server. no big deal.

Ought to consider something like Reload. Makes this kind of thing easy.

marvin

Marvin Huffaker, MCNE
Marvin Huffaker Consulting, Inc.
A Novell Platinum Partner

http://www.redjuju.com

 

[maxthedork]

I'm leaning toward the USB drive option. The problem I face is that the PO is just over 105 GB and I don't have that kind of free space on ANY of our NetWare boxes. I had considered restoring it to another server but I just don't have the space, which sucks. I'm going to try to mount a USB drive as a NetWare volume on the mail server and see if that works. Thanks for your suggestions!

PS: What is "Reload"?

 

[marvhuffaker]

Gwava Reload is a 3rd party tool that is awesome for disaster recovery AND recovering mail when somebody makes a bonehead move and deletes a mailbox. It essentially stores copies of the entire post office, for several weeks (depending on storage space).

One of the most awesome tools to be developed recently. Tay Kratzer developed it, he used to work for Novell but now is at Gwava, but is highly regarded as one of the best GroupWise guys in the world.

You should be able to mount a USB drive. NetWare 6.5 supports it assuming your system board has a NetWare USB Driver.



Marvin Huffaker, MCNE
Marvin Huffaker Consulting, Inc.
A Novell Platinum Partner

http://www.redjuju.com

 

[maxthedork]

So ultimately here's what I did: I mounted a 1TB USB drive and restored the post office there, then set that up as the Restore Area.

I've been chirping for three years at this place that we need to get an email archive solution (such as GWArchive from Message Architects) but my pleas fall on deaf ears. Considering that it took me FOUR HOURS to restore a post office just so one user could restore items she was storing in her JUNK MAIL FOLDER, all of a sudden my requests for email archive are starting to get some attention.

The problem with keeping a copy of the post office (as with Gwava) is that we don't have the space on any of our servers to keep a copy of our bigger PO which is 105 GB in size. Of course, that was the one I had to restore the other day.

I'm going to look into Gwava and see if it's anything worth looking into, but I'm guessing that if we get our archive system that will solve a lot of our problems.

 

[goombawaho]

Just make sure your users understand what's going to happen to them under the "archive plan" and have management approve and/or send out the notification so it has more bite.

Lots of people ignore emails from IT. And management is often the first to complain about new restrictive email policies. "What do you mean this affects management as well?

 

[maxthedork]

See, we used to have a policy in place whereby all emails older than 150 days were automatically deleted from the server (expired), and each workstation would archive their own emails after 90 days. That way, active accounts wouldn't lose their email and it takes the archived stuff off the server and puts it on the local workstation. Back then, the PO sizes were manageable. But then our CIO came in and said he wanted to turn off archiving at the desktop and leave all emails on the server indefinitely so they get backed up. Within a few months our PO sizes doubled. Now we have this issue with restores and the CIO is asking me why the storage is such an issue. Well, gee, sir, I wonder why. )-:

 

[goombawaho]

Yep - management wants it both ways and it just can't be both ways.

By the way, putting the archived messages on the desktops is not a very good idea. Hard drive crash - bye bye important messages.

I know you had to do something with the messages, but that wouldn't have been my choice. You could have gotten scalped if a hard drive crashed on the Human Resources workstation and there was a lawsuit that required an e-mail to be pulled out of your hat.

 

[marvhuffaker]

Gwava Reload is really a DR solution and immediate recovery solution. M+ Archive is a long term storage solution. They have entirely different functions and in many cases both can prove to be extremely useful.

Marvin Huffaker, MCNE
Marvin Huffaker Consulting, Inc.
A Novell Platinum Partner

http://www.redjuju.com