> On 28/04/2022 01:57 Shawn Heisey <elyog...@elyograg.org> wrote: > > > On 4/27/22 16:18, Sean McBride wrote: > > I have a user (coworker) that accidentally deleted a mailbox and all its > > sub-mailboxes. > > > > I use Maildir format storage. I have backups. > > > > Is it enough to put the mailbox folder back where it was? I'm talking > > about the folder that contains 'cur', 'new', 'tmp', 'dovecot-uidlist', etc. > > Or would this desynchronize or otherwise confuse dovecot? Or is it > > preferable to use some doveadm command? Or...? > > > Disclaimer: I am not affiliated with the project, and I am definitely > not an expert. I've been running dovecot for my personal mail server > for a long time, thankfully with very few incidents. I have done some > manual surgery on my maildir mailbox and seen how it reacts. Dovecot is > very resilient. > > What you describe should be sufficient. It's how I would proceed with a > restore. In most cases I would copy the backup on top of any existing > structure, rather than doing a wholesale replace, because any new mail > received should have different filenames than what is in the backup. > > If it were me, I would probably delete all the files that have a > filename starting with "dovecot" in that user's mailbox, and restart > dovecot, letting dovecot rebuild those files when the user connects. I > don't really have any experience with how things operate over POP3, I've > always used IMAP with dovecot. > > I'm interested to know whether the real experts here have different > advice than this, in case I ever find myself in that situation. There > might be some doveadm commands that accomplish the dovecot* file > rebuilding in a cleaner way. > > Thanks, > Shawn
There is no reason to delete the dovecot files after recovery. You can run `doveadm force-resync` to ensure everything is synced. Removing the files just cause more problems than benefit usually. Aki
