What exactly was migrated? Our mailbox now has over 500 messages in it, most of which are old messages that were deleted during the past week. Was an old tape used to restore the new server??
No, the server migration process began last week, with RSYNCs taking place between the old and new server.. The RSYNCs were carried till upto 2 minutes before the old server was pulled down and the new server was put online.
So yes, if you deleted some emails over the last 5 days, they’ll reappear in your mail box. But no new emails would have been lost.
We did not use any backups, all email from the old server was copied over to the servers over a number of days. So if you deleted email within those days, you’d see them reappear again.
Ok thanks, I guess we will have to sort through them all again. Between webmail being down on mail4 this morning nand now this, not a great way to start the week. Certainly not a transparent migration. X(
Well, transparent to us is
- Ensuring the least possible downtime, in this case 4 minutes
- Customer’s do not lose any emails, and can continue work after the migration.
The issue of old email reappearing is something that is a trade-off in ensuring there is minimal downtime and no mail loss. The time frame was short (about 5 days), and unless you deleted 500 emails this really wouldn’t be an issue with most customers.
I do see your frustration with this however, and I apologise for that.
Ok thanks, at least nothign was lost. Just facing the same 500+ emails is not what I call transparent from the customer point of view. 5 days is a laong time.
I did not see any old emails reappear..
Basically, if you use outlook to download email.. it doesn’t delete downloaded email messages, it just marks the email as read. Those settings get transfered over when doing the RSYNC.. so it remains as read and you won’t see that email in your mailbox again.
However if an email was deleted after the first RSYNC occured, it would remain on the new server and not on the old server… The RSYNC only transfered new files over to the new mail server.. If files were deleted from the old mail server, they weren’t deleted from the new mail server..
So when you check your checked your email for the first time on the new server, deleted emails would reappear