So I just had a client who was gone for a couple weeks email me that he couldnt log in to his mail. I checked it out and turns out that all his email addresses no longer existed (although you can see them when you log into the control panel) and he lost all email. Im talking everything, he’s on the road all the time and relies heavily on checking it via web. All because Jodohost apparently does not back up their mail servers (thats what tech support told me).
WHAT? We have many backups of our servers, please give me a ticket ID.
I just spoke with Ranjan, he said it was not that we do not have backups, but that mail backups take a very long time to restore and are much more complex that the web backups that we can not simply restore in a short period.
Backups however are not kept forever and we have to recycle the backups to make space on our backup servers as well, and if something has been gone for 2-3 weeks we may not have it in backups. However we DO keep backups, multiple backups in fact of our mail servers.
the ID is MPT-99877-712
I was told this…
pixellab: will you be able to get all his emails back?
pixellab: I created a ticket
Manish: sorry, but we are not providing email backup
pixellab: so all his emails are gone?
Manish: yes
I have not heard from anyone about the status of my ticket.
Ranjan is still looking into this right now, he has the accounts re-created at this point.
do you know if they will be able to restore the emails?
He was not able to restore from the auto restore methods we have so is searching backusp for you by hand, this is the part that takes some time.
[QUOTE=pixellab]
All because Jodohost apparently does not back up their mail servers (thats what tech support told me).
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We only provide web and database backups according to our stated policy.
Mail backups are difficult to extract and provide. We keep mail backups for server crashes.. However, it most cases we do take the time and do restore mail boxes for clients.. especially if they have lost important email. But since you say the email was lost for weeks, we do not keep mail backups for that long and couldn’t provide you with backup
Also, if your client accidently deleted his mail, or lost his mail for whatever reasons, it is quite harsh to blame the hosting company for not being able to restore it…
that is ridiculous,
the client did not delete his mail. The mail was lost on your end, the mailboxes had to be rebuilt there was no way to login. I could not even create a catch or forward the email until you sorted it out. Please take some responsibility in this.
The last time he checked his mail was from a week ago so can you please look into restoring it from a week ago.
I’d be interested in hearing some more on this. It is hard for me to imagine that all his emails just disappeared. I have been reselling for many years and have never had that happen.
Not saying it didn’t, but I would like to know more about what happened.
I still havent heard from jodohost why it happened but all email address for that domain were gone. You could still see them in the email manager but you could not login, change the password, set up any sort of forwarding and all email boxes were completely empty.
If he accidently deleted all his emails he still should have been able to login, etc.
When I sent test emails to his accounts all emails were bounced back with a message that the mailbox did not exist.
.. still no word from jodohost and my ticket has dissapeared. Very professional.
You asked a question Ranjan replied, and set the ticket to resolved it is not deleted. Look in the resolved tickets.
Ranjan looked in daily backups back to 10 days and this account was not there, so we could not restore the emails, but we restored the account information and tested it fully. For us to do a restore we need to know it is needed pretty quickly, espeically for email that is very large and we mostly keep for server backup restoration purposes.
Hi,
We are sorry for no backup of your emails on our backup server. But your domain emails account was missconfiguration on the mail server so you were not able to login your email accounts. we have fixed it. all emails are working fine and send/receive working fine. Sorry for delay replying your ticket.
Regards
Ranjan
misconfiguration on the mail server? how does that happen and how often?
Hsphere can do things sometimes, typically the user gets an error and submits a ticket and we fix it, prehaps the user was too busy to do that this time and we did not learn about it until very late.
It does not happen too often on mail, on windows it happens more often, most of the time either double binding an IP or server alias causing the site not to load anymore, we have to fix it manually then.
[QUOTE=KCWebMonkey]
misconfiguration on the mail server? how does that happen and how often?
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This is the first time I am hearing of something like this happening.. Mail boxes don’t just simply disappear.
I’d concur with Stephen, I suspect the user ran into some odd HSphere bug while performing some configuration on his email account that resulted in this issue. Since it wasn’t reported to us immediately, there was very little we could do in terms of recovering mail…
So what I am hearing in all of this is…
Jodo Host is not “set-up” or able to provide “Brick Level” mail backups. Jodo Host relays that they “back up” but then admits that it is only for disaster recovery events.
I can also safely assume that a Son, Father, Grandfather backup schema is not utilized.
Pretty low-end configurations… BUT THEN AGAIN…
This is shared hosting. You get what you pay for in all aspects of life.
I think that advertising “Daily Server Backups” would support any clients belief that you can restore deleted “anything” within a given retention period.
But only backing up for DR is risky and not at all efficient for restorations.
I have lost mail off one of the 3 or 4 webmail clients that are offered. Not saying that is the same thing, but it does happen.
I consider this guy’s complaint legitimate. The guy was an ass on chat (no surprise to me) and he had a reason to believe that his data was being backed up.
All in all, I think he has called out Jodo Host for delivering below average service and support.
I think the only resolution is for both parties to learn their lessons.
You don’t get Mountains from Mole Hills.
Jodo needs to stop false advertising backups. DR backups do users no good.
My 2 cents…
You have to love DSH!
dsh, you are missing the point. While we officially do not offer mail server restorations, we DID look through our mail backups to see if we had a backup with the mail files. We keep upto a week of backups for all our servers… and his emails were gone for at least 10+ days..
If the customer has informed us even within 9 days of the event, we would have been able to restore his files… But the mail was not there for at least 10+ days.. We checked Mail backups for upto 10 days and couldn’t find his files..
Pre-Sales FAQ, Windows Hosting, Reseller Hosting
If my database or websites files get corrupt, can you restore it from a backup?
Yes, we will do so for free.
Our free restoration policy covers only web and databases.. And we do restore web files and databases for customers, free of cost EVERY DAY
We’ve been in this business for 3+ years now and we have fine-tuned our backup/restore procedures to satisfy both the disaster recovery scenario and the user recovery scenario. Mail server restorations aren’t easy, yet we do them in cases where it is possible…
I will see what happened in this case, but email does NOT get deleted from our mail servers by itself. There are 13,000 accounts on the system and probably over 70,000 mailboxes… and this is the first time I am seeing an issue where we have had a loss of email that doesn’t seem like a mistake by the customer..
pixellab, I do apologise for the unexplained loss of access to your mail boxes. Trust me, WE HAVE tried to look into potential causes and we have still not found anything on our system to blame yet.
We’ll update you when we can find a potential cause..
Also, please do realise that if you had informed us only a day or two earlier, we would have been able to restore your email as well
dsh,
Just want to explain a bit about the mail backups, as they are not done the same as a web backup. Mail tends to have millions to tens of millions of very tiny files, far more than a web server does(although a web server may also have millions), restoring these files simply on customer request can have a bad impact on the running mailserver to restore the files, on a webserver this is not the case and we can do a restore basically just by copying over the one users folder in a very logical way and it does not hurt any other user on the web server side. We can not retain backups forever, we have over 3.5TB of backup space on our servers, and we continually at to this, but nothing will ever allow us to keep files back long periods of time until some company comes out with that famed “unlimited” hard drive. 