I know, I know, I’m a few days late for the whole World Backup Day craziness. But here we go anyway – remember to backup. And… remember to check your backups and archives!
Every 3 months I archive my clients’ emails to keep my imap mailbox nice and clean. A couple of weeks ago was that 3 month mark. “Ok, so what’s the big deal?” you may be wondering. Well, I deleted my emails without first checking the archive to make sure they were backed up! The archive was empty!
Even though I’ve had mostly good clients, I still like to keep an archive of all emails for the “just in case” scenario – so I instantly panicked. I use imap for all my email accounts so the first thing was to try and grab the emails off a mail client that hadn’t yet deleted them. After a half hour of trying to get the emails I gave up – it would have taken hours to extract the needed data from the mbox files.
And then – a sudden stroke of genius – I keep backups of my websites… duh! I opened the tar file, went to the mbox folder for my email account, uploaded all of the missing emails back to my server and ta-da – the emails were back. Hooray – thank goodness those backups were good.
The only annoying bug with this “fix” is the timestamps are now off on my email clients. An easy enough problem to fix… but eh… I’m too lazy for that.
So there you go. While it is important to backup your data it is just as important to check your backups! Also, remember that having multiple backups is key!
