Help recover contacts after catastrophic hardware failure

MrJittery

I had every single drive in my boot/root raid fail at the same time (made the mistake of using same manufacturer for every drive). I have backups upon backups, but they’re all file backups and not bare metal. I was able to recover emails and calendars via .pst backups, but the .psts do not contain any contacts. The folder is empty. Is there any way to recover contacts from a file backup? I have looked in the database and didn’t see anything. I see all the emails in the file system. I just cannot find where the contacts are stored. Can anyone help me recover my boss’ contacts so that I can keep my job?

Thanks in advance.

fbartels

Hi @MrJittery,

for critical issues I would rather recommend to first reach out the the Kopano partner you’ve bought a subscription from and if that one cannot help get in contact with our support/professional services to discuss further options. (but I must also add that its already late friday afternoon here so I don’t want to make any promises for today)

I was able to recover emails and calendars via .pst backups,

pst backup? are you sure you are using Kopano? we do not have a backup utility that exports pst files

Is there any way to recover contacts from a file backup?

how do you define file backup? innodb data file? sqldump?

MrJittery

Thank you for the response. I do not have a subscription. I am just a community user. Sorry if I posted in the wrong place.

The pst backups were from within Outlook, connected to Kopano via zpush/KOE.

Unfortunately, I don’t have a dump… only the data files from rsync backups. I can load the database into another MariaDB instance and view the data just fine, but none of it looks like anything that would be helpful to me, unfortunately.

fbartels

@MrJittery said in Help recover contacts after catastrophic hardware failure:

I don’t have a dump… only the data files from rsync backups. I can load the database into another MariaDB instance and view the data just fine, but none of it looks like anything that would be helpful to me, unfortunately.

In that case you should hook a kopano-server process to this database and then use kopano-backup to backup and restore the desired items.

but why don’t you (want to) do a full restore from these files (transplant them to a new system) in general?

MrJittery

@fbartels said in Help recover contacts after catastrophic hardware failure:

In that case you should hook a kopano-server process to this database and then use kopano-backup to backup and restore the desired items.

I’ll see if I can get a VM fired up and give that a try. Thank you for the pointer.

but why don’t you (want to) do a full restore from these files (transplant them to a new system) in general?

I’d love to, but I went into panic mode and got hosted email so we could get back up as soon as possible. I tried restoring everything from the back ups I have, but I failed at every attempt. I couldn’t get the server to boot properly. We already paid for the hosted email so we may as well use it. I spent 2 weeks of days and sleepless nights getting everything configured and tweaked on this server. All the other software installed on the server was tightly integrated and it all worked so beautifully. I nearly cried when it crashed. I am defeated and don’t want to do it all over again.

mcostan

I learned by experience (hard one) that the best in my case was to install everything only on VMs and overnight I take a mysql backup of the entire database AND a physical copy of the VM database disk itself. I.e. a snapshot of the entire VM disk in that moment.

I then keep a few days back of the database dump AND the copy of the VM.

Perhaps a bit extreme, but it did save me a few times in the past.

In case of catastrophic hardware failure because I just run VMs, I can take out the Raid disks and move them elsewhere.

And I keep copies of the database dumps and VM disks outside the main server too. They are copied during the day.

Gerald

Veeam Backup for Linux (Veeam Agent for Linux) is completely free by the way and can nicely do image based backups from a running system which should be consistent enough for the database to work. You can just install it and backup to a NAS or another server with a fileshare. I use that in addition to creating database snapshots and rsync’ing the files to another machine which then does btrfs snapshots of those backups.