distinct circumstances call for distinct restoration procedures, which can vary depending on the individuals involved, the extent and scope of the restore, and the goal. These are a few instances of these situations:
- the unintentional destruction of emails due to human mistake, such as emptying the Trash can folder
- a file system issue that might result in reading and writing failures and render some portions of an account unavailable
- administrative mistakes, including those that occur during the undelete procedure
- Due to the use of false or stolen credentials, an account has been hacked.
- The enforcement authorities require access to an account’s whole history since they are looking into it.
In any of these scenarios, the data in a mailbox can be restored. Restore solutions fall into two categories based on the destination of the recovered data: recovery on the same server—or same infrastructure—and recovery on a different infrastructure.
reinstall the same infrastructure
These methods are designed to be applied when only a portion of an account on the same server as the origin server has to be restored. Restore Deleted Account, Single Item Restore, Restore on New Account, and Time-range Undelete all come under this category.
various infrastructure restoration
Use of the External restoration approach is a possibility when the restoration procedure is not practicable or doable on the same infrastructure as the original.
It is significant to note that things in Zextras Backup are still accessible to Zextras before they are marked as destroyed and removed from a mailbox as a result of a Backup Purge operation.
Lastly, all restoration techniques:
- retrieve things at a specific time (or interval), which means that they are also recovered in their status at that time.
- retrieving a file from a different folder than the original
- At the start and completion of the restore operation, you should always send the administrator and the procedure’s initiator an email.
If the message has been deleted or is otherwise no longer accessible, such as after being taken out of the trash, it may still be found by looking through the mailbox.log log file and looking for one of the message’s other meta-data, such as the time it was deleted, the sender or recipient, the content, etc. However, you can only use this approach if you have administrative access, so if you don’t, you should ask your admin for help.
What is Restore Deleted Account and how does it work?
The Restore destroyed Account technique enables you to import the settings and content of a mailbox into a brand-new account exactly as they were at the time the mailbox was destroyed.
How does it function?
When a Restore Deleted Account is initiated, a new account (the Destination Account) is established, and all the objects present in the source account at the time of the deletion—including the folder structure and all of the user’s data—are restored in the destination account. Unless the option labelled Obey HSM Policy is ticked, all recovered objects will be generated in the current main store.
Zextras Backup tab, please
- To display the Zextras Backup tab, select Zextras Backup in the Administration Console’s left pane.
- Push the Restore Deleted Account button on the top bar
- Pick a restoration date. The hour may be chosen from a drop-down menu, the minute and second from two text boxes, and the day, month, and year can be selected using a minical. Choose Next
- Look through the list, then select the account you want to recover (Source).
- In the text box, type the name of the new account (Destination). The new account may then be hidden in GAL, if you so want. Press Next after you’re done selecting.
- Examine each selection you make in the Operation Summary panel. To get notifications when the restore procedure is complete, you may optionally add other email addresses. Please take note that notifications are sent by default to the admin account and the person who initiated the restore operation.
Finish clicking to launch the Restore.
What is Single Item Restore and how does it work?
One of the restore modes offered by Zextras Backup is the Single object Restore, which enables the restoration of a single object at a time while restoring its status even if it was deleted.
How does it function?
Single Item Restore retrieves the appropriate item from the backup using the itemID and restores it to the owner’s account. This method may be used to repair any kind of object.
A Single Item Restore is being run.
What is Restore on New Account and how does it work?
You may restore a mailbox’s contents exactly as they were at a certain point in time using the Restore on New Account and Account Restore methods. They both have the same CLI parameters, but they differ in how the mailbox will be restored and how the account status is handled: after an account is still active, it can be restored into a brand-new account, i.e., with a brand-new accountID, however after an account has been deleted, it can be restored with the same accountID-Account Restore.
It is feasible to retrieve one or more deleted things from a user’s account without really rolling back their whole inbox because the source account is left untouched. You have the option to conduct this type of restoration with the newly established account hidden from the GAL as a security precaution.
How does it function?
This process is helpful in a number of situations, including when a whole account has been erased or is no longer functional due to a human error (such as an incorrect delete/purge operation conducted by the user or system administrator) or an external issue (hardware or storage failure).
A new account, referred to as the destination account, is established when a Restore on New Account operation begins. The folder structure and all of the user’s data are rebuilt in the destination account together with all the things that were present in the source account at the time they were selected. Unless the option labelled Obey HSM Policy is ticked, all recovered objects will be generated in the current main store.
Restoring a new account after a backupWhat is Time-range Undelete and how does it work?
Time-range Undelete, also known as Undelete Restore, is a Restore Mode that enables an administrator to recover all things that were deleted from the Trash folder during a specified period of time from a mailbox and reset their status back to what it was before the deletion.
How does it function?
The Zextras Backup engine examines the backup datastore for things marked as DELETED in the given time period during a Time-range Undelete, and then restores them in the source folder of the mailbox. All objects that have been restored will be identified by the string undelete_DD_MM_YY, where DD_MM_YY is the date on which the undelete was performed.
The undeleted objects’ structure is kept, and each subdirectory is restored using the most recent attribute that was accessible during the time frame being restored. In the absence of any data, the folder will be titled unknown_XX.
extreme instances
There are two things worth emphasising:
- The trash bin will be reinstated for any items or folders that, for whatever reason, had the trash can as their only and initial position.
- Consider a folder with the name Conference 2021. Remove everything in it and change its name to Conference 2022. You later do an Undelete Restore on the mailbox on November 15, 2021. The folder Conference 2021 will include all of the recovered objects and information with the tag undelete_15_11_21.
Setting up a Time-range External Restore can be restored.
The External Restore: What is it?
The ability to import backups created on a separate infrastructure is provided by the External Restore feature, which is important for sophisticated activities like disaster recovery or putting up a test environment that is similar to the production environment. The source server and destination server cannot be the same for any other approach; this makes it the sole one.
One intriguing and practical feature of External Restore is that in addition to restoring data, it also restores all of an account’s shares.
How does it function?
The External Restore replicates data, information, and configuration to a new server from the Backup Path on the source server. The process is explained below and broken into three Phases. It comprises of a workflow with a number of components.
An example of a situation where External Restore comes in handy is when you need to move a server from your infrastructure in Rome to your infrastructure in Milan. The fundamental access requirement is that in order to perform an external restoration on your Milan infrastructure from the Milan server (the destination), you must have access to the Backup Path on the Rome server (the source).
Do not use Domain Provisioning
Although the External Restore is typically used on the entire infrastructure, it can also be applied to single or multiple accounts; in this case, only the data and metadata that belong to those accounts will be restored, not domain-level customizations (such as COS, GAL, quota, and so on). The skip_domain_provisioning argument may be used for this operation, as shown in the example that follows, which only restores the accounts john and alice in domain example.com:
When utilising the skip_domain_provisioning option, the process that is described below does not apply; just the Restore all Accounts’ Attributes step will be carried out in Phase 1 because no domain configuration will be affected.
Restoring a folder
Think about creating a folder named Inbox/Zextras (which is also its Backup Path) and subsequently deleting some messages from there that were in a backup. These messages are restored together with any other messages that may already be present in the Inbox/Zextras folder when an External Restore is performed. In other words, since the restored folder and an existent folder both share the same Backup Path, the restored messages are saved there.
What occurs is as follows in greater detail:
regional file
The backup folder id will be mapped to the existing folder id if a folder with the same path has previously been established by a filter. Additionally, everything that was in the original folder will be returned to its original location.
external mail box
The mountpoint will be restored if a filter had created a folder with that path. The filter also updates the filter to write to the restored mountpoint, and all things in the folder (generated by the filter) are relocated to the mountpoint target.
Before You Begin
It is expected that you have already set up a fresh vanilla infrastructure, or, more specifically, a fresh instance of Zextras that has only undergone a regular installation.
In fact, the first thing to do is initialise Zextras Backup and create a Backup Path on the new infrastructure, unless you wish to use the default one (/opt/zextras/backup/zextras).
Additionally, you may put the following recommendations into practise to lessen the total overhead and stress on the server during the External Restore.
- Disable the RealTime Scanner if Zextras Backup has already been initialised on the destination server to optimise memory utilisation and I/O performance.
- Advanced users can modify or turn off Zimbra’s RedoLog for the length of the import to decrease I/O overhead and the amount of disc space required for the migration.
- It is feasible to enable compression on your current main volume before beginning the import to consume less disc space overall. It is feasible to establish a new, uncompressed primary disc, set it to Current, and convert the previous one to Secondary if you do not want to utilise a compressed primary drive after migration. The Zextras Powerstore module enables this process.
- Running an external restore;
You may restore several accounts simultaneously with the concurrent_accounts argument, considerably accelerating the restoration process. This functionality is only accessible through CLI.
After the Restoration The duplication of messages
After an External Restore, it is strongly advised to do a volume-wide deduplication using the Zextras Powerstore module because the native deduplication mechanism might not work well when importing accounts consecutively.