Re: Oops: Charter Empties 14,000 E-Mail Accounts

[Valdis.Kletnieks () vt edu]

On Thu, 24 Jan 2008 22:09:15 EST, der Mouse said:

> Yeesh, that's *such* glaring incompetence.  Uh, guys, ever hear of
> *backups*?!

Yeah.  And you know what?  Sometimes, the backups only run daily, so
if you have a major whoops and lose the terabyte of mail spool, any mail that
arrived since 3:07AM last night has effectively evaporated.

That's overlooking the fact that even if you *have* a backup, restoring it
may be interesting - consider if you have an *active* mailstore, and backups
as of 5 minutes before you lost it.  Now you get in a new terabyte of disk,
and you're left with a quandary - you can stay down for 2-3 days while you
restore that terabyte and then open up port 25 to the outside world and hope
that you don't get torpedoed by the incoming flood.  Or you can start accepting
mail, and restore that backup to *some other* terabyte of disk you just pulled
out of an orifice - and then figure out how to insert the restored mail
into the mailboxes (hint - the following *does not* work without additional
locking:

mv ${USER}.mbox ${USER}.mbox.tmp
mv ${USER}.restored ${USER}.mbox
cat ${USER}.mbox.tmp >> ${USER}.mbox
rm ${USER}.mbox.tmp

So you'll have to be more clever about it.

(Yes, I *know* you can play games with SAN systems to take on the fly snapshots
and then backup the snapshots and stuff like that - but that sort of stuff
adds significantly to the pricetag.  I know *my* job would get a lot easier
if somebody budgeted $300K for the hardware, software, licenses, and maintenance
contracts so I could do that sort of replication and snapshotting for our
backup service....)

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