Corrupt AMS backup file

[DTower5]

Hi,

I've been trying to move my installation over to a new server but with 25GB worth of data it is impossible to move it in one fell swoop. I came up with the idea of grouping users in a new server/old server switch and force them to use the new server by means of a redirect template by group. I imported via CVS a mapped drive which contained the account data on the old server and when the change occurred it wiped the address books sig files and personnel files of everyone in that domain. I'm now trying to get it back via our backups but I have a second problem - none of the backup files will be read by two different installations of AMS 2.62. So, is there a way to read the file manually just to get the files I need from the account directories?

Thanks

[sillyme]

When I have moved servers I have done the following

Take old server offline
Copied the ability directory to the new system.
Reinstalled AMS.
Check that users, domains, etc... are still there
Make sure the new server is using the old servers IP
place the new server online and send test emails

If you are unable to completely take the old server offline, you can use a router to port forward the mail to the new server and the other stuff to the old server.

[DTower5]

Copied the ability directory to the new system.

This is the long part and something that would cause service to to be down for longer than allowed.

[rob]

Sorry to hear about your misfortune, when you create a user through the admin interface and then save it. It will overwrite the files at the user account directory with the empty address book that was spawned with the new user (mails and folders are fine, but settings are lost as you have seen). The best way to avoid this is to create the users externally, by either adding them to your database or if you use the file system, append them to the users.ini. The mail server will then automatically pick up on the new users next time it polls the INI's and load the users in without having to save/overwrite the user accounts. As to the backup problem, although corrupted backup files are fortunatly quite rare, if they are corrupted there is no way to be able to read them otherwise. If they were small enough I would of course be happy to examine the file and try to manually fix the corruption, but 25 GB is simply to large for your to send. There is one possible trick you could try. The backup file presently is uncompressed (something we plan to remedy in the future) and so you can use a text editor to examine the file. If the text editor can deal with 25GB of data, you could search the backup file and find the chunk of text that is the address book of effected users. If you can identify and locate the affected users, you could copy and paste the addressbook settings back out. In the mean time I have made a recommendation for us to improve the resilence on the reading of backup files and make the algorithm more able to deal with corruption (basically, its possible some checks are failing which otherwise most of the file should still be fine to use).

[DTower5]

I was able to recover everyone's address book by just parsing out the backup file. Thanks for your help