[Dovecot] Problems restoring from dump

[Leeman Strout]

Paul Lathrop wrote:
> Hello all,
> 
> First, the vital stats: FreeBSD 6.1-STABLE, dovecot 1.0.rc7 from ports.
> 
> I have run into a vexing little problem that has brought my deployment 
> of a shiny new dovecot server to a screeching halt. Using 'periodic' 
> I've configured regular backups to occur using 'dump'. I have a monthly 
> level 0, a weekly level 4, and a daily level 8. These dumps take 
> advantage of snapshots to ensure they are taking a backup of a 
> consistent filesystem. As part of the beta testing, I decided to delete 
> my maildir and attempt to recover from the dumps.
> 
> Recovery went well, as dump/restore is a wonderful piece of software. I 
> did a quick check at the file level to be sure my mailbox looked like it 
> had when I took the last level 8 dump, and everything looked good. The 
> problem came when I started up Thunderbird to take a look at my mail. 
> When I selected a message, say one that said "knockout daily run 
> output", I'd be reading a different message entirely, like a recent 
> email from my boss! Most of the messages were like this - hopelessly 
> scrambled! I tried just deleting the account in Thunderbird and 
> connecting again, but that didn't change a thing.
> 
> What happened!? Dump has faithfully restored the files, including the 
> dovecot indexes... so why are my messages scrambled?
> 
> Thanks for your help,
> Paul


Try wiping out the indexes... It may be a situation where the in-memory 
index did not get refreshed from the file index for some reason...


Leeman