MAIL

Restoring a shared mail database
Data loss is an unusual occurrence, but it can occur. To prevent data loss in a shared mail database, enable transaction logging, and use a backup utility that supports transaction logs. When you restore from the backup media, IBM® Lotus® Domino™ automatically applies any notes that have been added since the backup was taken. In general, you should perform a complete backup at least once a week, and incremental backups of the transaction logs every day. Refer to the documentation that came with your backup utility for specific recommendations.

If you do not use transaction logging, back up the shared mail database at least once a day and use multiple shared mail databases on the server. Using multiple shared mail databases on different physical disks can reduce the amount of shared mail data lost in the event of database corruption or disk failure.

If data loss occurs on a server that does not use transaction logging or was not backed up using a utility that supports transaction logging, you may be unable to restore some messages to the shared mail database. Therefore, users' mail files might still contain message headers that reference message content that was not restored in the shared mail database. These users cannot read these messages because the shared mail database doesn't contain the corresponding message content.

To restore a shared mail database when transaction logging is not enabled

1. Download the most recent backup copy of the shared mail database to a directory that is not part of the Domino server's directory structure. The Domino server's directory structure includes the data directory, directories that are referenced by directory links, and subdirectories of all of these directories. The directory can be on a network drive if there is not enough room on the server's local disks to store the backup copy of the shared mail database.

2. At the console, enter the Push command to push changes from the backup shared mail database to the current shared mail database. For example, after downloading the backup copy of the shared mail database into the directory h:\backup, enter this command at the console:


3. Delete the backup copy of the shared mail database.

4. In the user's mail file, purge messages that no longer have corresponding message content in the shared mail file.

See also