05
Jul
Support queries shared: The pitfalls of bare metal backups that include multiple disks
I came across an issue on a support call the other day I thought worth sharing as it's bound to be something a few of you will see too.
The customer I was talking to was using the Windows imaging engine in BackupAssist to back up both their system drive 'C:' and a large data drive 'D:' (used for every day document storage etc.).
This was working just as expected and backups were updating quickly to a local USB hard drive when the inevitable happened - they had a local hard drive failure and of course wanted to perform a bare metal recovery from the last good image backup.
In the last couple of weeks I've come across a few customers with MailStore installations where they've experienced corruption of their archived data due to either a damaged disk, RAID failure or power outage for example.
All of these situations are of course completely outside of MailStore's control but they're ones where the only practical recovery method is to rebuild from a previous backed up version of the MailStore data.
Some of our most common MDaemon support enquiries we get relate to users receiving spam.
Typically the amount of spam has either suddenly increased and there is a flood of junk messages or its just a specific message that looks to be obviously spam but has somehow made its way through.
Before picking up the phone to support you might find it useful to follow this simple guide to find out why MDaemon has not treated this message quite as expected.
Using the MailStore search feature makes it very easy to find messages. Once you've located the message you're after, MailStore gives you a few options such as view, reply, forward or restore, which make it easy to manage single messages however you wish.
In this post I'm going to take a look at how you can use MailStore to take this a step further and quickly restore whole folders, complete with the messages they contain to various destinations.
Finding the email you're after in MailStore using the Outlook search plug-in is beautifully straight forward. In the vast majority of cases simply entering the word you think is likely to appear in the to/from address, subject, message body or even in attachments is enough, however every so often it can be useful to have the ability to whittle down your search results further or be more specific.
In