New Backup System finished

I’ve just finished the final component of the conversion of the backup system - a new restore utility.

There were a couple of problems with the old restore utility, stemming from its design of just copying the messages back into the folder and reconstructing to make them “appear” - it didn’t work safely with some IMAP clients, it didn’t work safely with replication and there was a possibility that you could delete messages that were already there if you forced the restore to overwrite what was there.

Oh - and a restore could easily push you over quota if you were near the edge as well.

So - the new restore system is much simpler and safer for all cases, though it involves a little more manual work:

• the admin at our end selects which folders to restore
• the backup system does its magic and a brand new folder tree appears at:

RESTORED.username.YYYYMMDDTHHMMSS

Where “username” is the localpart of your login name, and YYYYMMDDTHHMMSS is a timestamp in year, month, day, hour, minute, second format with a ‘T’ in the middle.

This folder will be deleted automatically one week later. It doesn’t count towards your quota usage during that time, though any emails copied out to a normal folder will of course count as usual.

(I’ve started a forum thread as well for discussion:  http://www.emaildiscussions.com/showthread.php?t=51151)