On Fri, 15 Dec 2006, Mark Crispin wrote:
Inspect the .mixmeta file in the damaged mailbox. Is it still sane? Compare
it with the one in the restored copy.
I may have lost the damaged one (I mean, I ran Pine which may
have overwritten it, but I think it was sane
What I did:
- restored .mixstatus and .mixindex from a "dirvish" backup (easy - it's
just an rsync copy)
- now I could read all the messages (a sample anyway; there are 3000
messages)
But there were about 10 messages arrived since the backup was made, so
I cut them off the end of the .mix data file and made them into a Unix
mailbox by the expedient of
sed 's/^:msg:.*/From <some plausible string>/'
then checked it with Pine, then did
$ mailtutil append mailbox extra-messages
This pretty much seemed to have fixed things. It is unlikely that the
user did a lot of work (deleting, answering) between the backup at 11:45
pm and the power bump at 6am
The broken .mixindex and .mixstatus look to have been the original
length, but contained 100% zeroes (ASCII NUL)
For repairing MBX files, I found that if data went missing in the middle
of a message, then the pointer list got lost so I had to regenerate it
from SMTP message headers (as marking a new message). I would think that
still applies to MIX, though perhaps it's not so likely to break.
It would be nice to start from a broken status file to restore message
status where it exists, rather than set it all to zero, but you'd still
need the option to recreate .mixstatus entirely. Though in that case it
may be easier to make a Unix box as I just did and convert it back.
Incidentally, in mixfmt.txt for .mixindex it says
: <uid>:<date>:<size>:<hsiz>:<file>:<pos>: (6 fields)
while in mix.c it defines
uid, date, size, spare.data, special.offset, msg.header.offset,
msg.header.text.size (7 fields)
Hmm, in mixfmt it does actually list 7 fields, so isiz is missing from
the list and I'm confused about the order.
(in my last problem, with a missing .mixnnnn file, I suspect it was
probably there all along but in a different save set due to incremental
backup.)
--
Andrew Daviel, TRIUMF, Canada
Tel. +1 (604) 222-7376 (Pacific Time)
[EMAIL PROTECTED]
_______________________________________________
Imap-uw mailing list
[email protected]
https://mailman1.u.washington.edu/mailman/listinfo/imap-uw
