Date: Sun, 19 May 2002 06:42:38 -0400
From: "Theodore Ts'o" <tytso@MIT.EDU>
To: Laura Baldwin <boojum@mit.edu>
Cc: Camilla R Fox <cfox@mit.edu>, sipb@mit.edu
Subject: Re: confusion about recovering files for aaronmil
Message-ID: <20020519104238.GB9527@think.thunk.org>
References: <200205181838.OAA21678@myxomycete.mit.edu> <200205190012.UAA22236@geskekelud.mit.edu>
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On Sat, May 18, 2002 at 08:12:29PM -0400, Laura Baldwin wrote:
> 
> As I understand it, the user complained (among other places) to
> stopit, and Mark Van Dyke sent mail to the postmasters, and the
> postmasters restored his email.  Mark or the postmasters would
> probably know more details about under what circumstances such
> recovery can be done.

The postmasters do a once-a-day backup of the mail spools (but they
only keep something only keep the last 2 or 3 days worth of backups).
It's designed only as a saving throw against hard disk failures, and
back in the days before IMAP, it generally wasn't all that useful for
anything besides hardware failures, since most users only had unread
mail on the post offices.  Hence, it wasn't particularly useful for
someone who nuked all of their MH directory.  With IMAP, of course,
the backups become much more useful as saving throws against stupid
user tricks, but the backups aren't optimized for this, so it can be a
fairly major pain in the tuckus to restore from the backups.  As
always, this is something that users shouldn't rely upon being
there....

						- Ted