[Box Backup] Mailbox backup is dangerous.

[Per Reedtz Thomsen]

On 8/27/09 12:25 AM, Christian Tschabuschnig wrote:
> Hello,
>
> this e-mail (from 4 months ago) never got a reply from anyone. Is the
> below statement true? Or is it a misinterpretation of something else
> happening?
>    
On the surface, it appears that the real problem was that the mail 
messages were deleted from the mail server, and since there was not 
enough room on the boxbackup server, they were cleaned up during 
housekeeping.

If they hadn't been deleted from the mail server and/or there had been 
enough storage in the account on the backup server, the files would not 
have been removed.

Maybe I'm missing something, but before getting to the point that 
housekeeping starts removing files from the server, the account has to 
reach its storage limits.

Since there is no 'deleted timestamp' for a file (because it's gone), 
there is no readily available way to tell when it was deleted, except 
when boxbackup scans for it and marks it deleted in the store. This is 
not accurate of course, so I don't know how practical it would be to use 
it as a basis for when to remove files from the store during housekeeping.

Removing from the store by 'deleted-time' would necessitate tracking the 
deletion time stamp in the store, as well as the modified- and other 
timestamps on the file. During recovery these time stamps would need to 
be recovered, so they can't be overwritten.

My $0.02,
Per
> Tom Albers wrote:
>    
>> Housekeeping removes files from the store based on the actual file
>> date and not on the deletion time

-- 
Per Reedtz Thomsen | Reedtz Consulting, LLC | F: 209 883 4119
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