What would happen if an IMAP server crashed and lost all data?

cormie

Hey folks, I'm in the middle of migrating all my pop accounts to IMAP. I'm actually using Gmail to host everything with it's 15GB storage, so Gmail downloads from the domain server (5GB mailbox only) via pop and then syncs to Thunderbird via IMAP. It's working well so far from what I can see and means I've everything stored on Gmail and accessible from my phone and easily from any browser.

Anyway, I just had a question, what would happen if there happened to be a crash on the Gmail server (highly unlikely with Gmail I know) and all my data on the Gmail account was erased, or what one user on another thread warned of using Google, that they may close your account without any notice, or if I was using another server for IMAP who wasn't as reliable. If the mails are downloaded and stored locally too, will they always be there? Will Thunderbird realise there's been a server issue or account issue and not delete all the mails, or would it see the IMAP folder is empty on the server and subsequently delete all the content from my folders on Thunderbird?

I just want to be aware of any possible data loss were it to ever happen so I can make any necessary steps to ensure I've a backup procedure in place..

Any feedback would be great

PrzemoF

Switch Thunderbird to off-line state and check it.. I use Evolution and I can mark directories for off-line use.

cormie

Thanks, so as long as I can see them when in offline, it should mean they are stored locally?

ressem

You can have a look

http://kb.mozillazine.org/Profile_folder_-_Thunderbird

They are stored as Thunderbird mbox format files in the folder
C:\Users\<Windows user name>\AppData\Roaming\Thunderbird\Profiles\<Profile name>\ImapMail\

where profilename and username are dependent on your setup and appdata is a hidden folder within your user folder.

If the message is deleted and then the thunderbird profile is compacted, it is likely necessary to restore the file from backup.
http://kb.mozillazine.org/Undelete_a_message

cormie

Thanks very much! I guess I'll just have to take back ups now and then on the tiny tiny chance anything may ever happen the mail on the server

ressem

Backups now and then?
Can I suggest installing & using free Veeam Endpoint Backup?

(start advertising music)
Backing up then is little more than just plugging in the backup drive.
After the first, the drive be detected each time, and an incremental or full backup done.

Created a 12GB incremental restore point for me there in 4 minutes.

cormie

Thanks a lot for the suggestion. I had previously used Acronis True Image and found it good, but I would very rarely take a backup or even remember to do it.

I had a google on Veeam and they have a lot of fancy promo videos for a free product, so I was slightly suspicious that maybe they scrape some of the data, but I see on their site they have a lot of other products, expensive ones, so I guess the freebies are just loss leaders?

What exactly does it mean by endpoint?

By incremental, do you mean that it just detects any changes that have been made since the hard drive was plugged in last and syncs all the changes? How reliable is that I wonder? I always set my external drives to "do nothing" when they are connected, I wonder would it still detect it..

ressem

Endpoint as in not-a-server.

You can set it either way. 150GB full backup took 22 minutes from a C:\ SSD to a usb3 drive. It uses the built-in Microsoft Volume snapshots and included the recovery partitions.

You wouldn't be keeping as many old restore points in that full-backup-only scenario.

Their paying business is with server rooms running lots of VMWare / Hyper-V virtual machines. We'd have a Veeam backup server creating snapshots of servers on VMWARE ESXi / vCentre every 4 hours or so and then the offsite backup from those, rather than putting a load on the servers.

If the external drive (or NAS) is assigned a drive-letter on plugin then backup should auto-start. There's low impact Veeam taskbar program in the background.

This week, it detected that the big Win 10 creators update had been made and automatically did a full backup with warning notification.

With the less-stable state of windows 10, I'm sounding more like a paid backup evangelist. (which I'm not btw mods.) and find this much better than Acronis was.

cormie

Sounds good, thanks a lot.

Do you think it would be possible to have the following setup...

• Use IMAP mail with thunderbird so all mail is synced and accessible from Gmail as well as having a local copy stored in the thunderbird folder (already done)
• Use Veeam to schedule a daily* copy of the thunderbird folder to another backup folder which Sugarsync** would then upload so that it doesn't try upload a 2gb file which is being updated every time a new mail appears and has to restart again as I think it was doing when backing up directly to sugarsync from the thunderbird folder
• Then set it up to take a system backup every time the external Western Digital My Passport is inserted, which only detects the changes since the last backup and doesn't have to go through a full system backup each time?

*or if it takes 2 days to upload these to the cloud, then I'd be better off setting it for 3 days etc
**current cloud backup service. Maybe there are better out there. Haven't compared in about 3 years.

If this is done, I reckon I'd be pretty well set up

ressem

Use Veeam to schedule a daily* copy of the thunderbird folder to another backup folder which Sugarsync** would then upload so that it doesn't try upload a 2gb file which is being updated every time a new mail appears and has to restart again as I think it was doing when backing up directly to sugarsync from the thunderbird folder

No. You'd have one backup job configured in Veeam. Preferably a full machine backup.

To prevent the issue described, you'd be better off creating a local copy of the profile that is updated daily / on a schedule by robocopy and configure that directory instead to sync to Sugarsync.
robocopy.exe sourcefolder destfolder /Z /E /MOT:120
(copy sourcefolder to dest in restartable or backup mode, run each 120 mins if changes detected)

Then set it up to take a system backup every time the external Western Digital My Passport is inserted, which only detects the changes since the last backup and doesn't have to go through a full system backup each time?

That should be the default setup.

cormie

Thanks a lot. Sounds pretty confusing, but I'll try configure it once I've everything else ready You don't have a walk in shop by any chance? haha

cormie

Hey ressem, I've finally gotten to a stage where I'm in a position to set this up now. Do you offer any service for a fee where you would set this up by any chance? I also want to get a cloud solution for general backup of other files. Previously used SugarSync as mention, but considering switching, perhaps to Google Drive!

I've been advised to look for something with Data Deduplication.

There's a comparison of some services here: https://www.cloudwards.net/mega-vs-google-drive-vs-skydrive-vs-sugarsync/ but it's a little old.

edanto

@cormie, are you using Google Apps for your business email? (you mention gmail, but I presume it's Google Apps).

If so, then I'd suggest using a simpler backup product for all Google Apps data (email/drive/calendar/contacts/tasks)

https://spanning.com/products/google-apps-backup/

Spanning avoids a lot of hassles with the other option above and gives more coverage than just email.

For backing up files; you mentioned data duplication as a feature, but in my mind Versioning is a more important feature. This helps if ransomware takes hold; we can roll back to the version from a few days ago or last week.

There are a lot of products in that space, maybe I can help you figure out the best fit. Roughly how many computers are you talking about, what's the total volume of shared files and number of users; and what do you currently use for shared files? [It sounds like you might have used Sugarsync previously, but not now?]

Feel free to PM me those details for privacy. Some people in your position get by fine with Google Drive and the desktop apps; it's certainly the first one to add to the comparison.

cormie

Just to note that edanto has been very helpful through PM for helping me with all this.

I started a new thread which addressed some issues in more detail and have pasted info from Crashplan live chat here: http://www.boards.ie/vbulletin/showthread.php?t=2057752674

All seems good and it looks like I'll be going ahead with Crashplan