"ADSM: Dist Stor Manager" <ADSM-L@VM.MARIST.EDU> wrote on 05/30/2006 09:43:50 AM:
> We are in the process of migrating our mail infrastructure from HP OpenMail > to Lotus Domino. The legal department occasionally asks > IS to restore every message TSM has in its inventory for a > particular mail user. We have a tedious but well understood > process for complying with such requests for OpenMail. I am > trying to figure out how to handle similar requests for Domino > accounts. > > We are using TDP for Domino. We are currently performing a full > backup every night and are not backing up archive logs. How > would we go about restoring the various versions of one account's > database and consolidating all the messages recorded in those > versions? > > We are hoping to start backing up archive logs in the near future. > Roll forward recovery using archive logs will replay the creation > of messages that were deleted soon after reception. Unfortunately, > roll forward recovery will also replay the subsequent deletion. > Is there a way to get roll forward recovery to generate copies of > every message encountered? I don't know of any way to do this just using the TDP alone. We have done this for some of our customers by restoring a user's mail file as to what it looked like at the point of the daily full backup during the past X months and then writing a Domino agent that consolidates the different point-in-time restores of the user's mail file to a single master database removing all duplicates. The amount of disk space you have available for the restore will determine how many different days worth of restores you perform before running the consolidation and de-duplication process. What you end up with is basically every message that was in that user's mail file for the past X number of months at the time of the full backup each night. It can be a very tedious process depending upon how far you need to go back. The other thing to keep in mind is it is almost impossible to catch _every_ message that ever existed. It is possible to catch every message that existed for the past X months at X time of the day though. For example, if a user gets an email at 8:00am and then deletes that email at noon, your full backup at midnight won't reflect that message - it will be as if it never existed. The only way to ever catch these types of messages would be to replay the logs but ignore all the delete transactions in the log. Not sure if there is a way to do that or if it would compromise the integrity of the mail file. A better solution if you have these types of requirements is to purchase an email archiving solution along the likes of Commonstore for Domino where you can set policies to automatically archives messages older than a certain number of days, retain them as long as you need, and don't allow users to ever delete messages.