Hi Dan, 30 hours seems a little long to me too. There are probably good reasons for it..and your provider should be able to tell you what happened.
We once had a catastrophic crash and had to move everyhing to a new server. We had the imail files backed up..including the registry keys. Anyway, we got mail back online in 8 hours and then most of the other services up a few hours later. If your provider had good backups.. I'm not sure why it would take 30 hours. It could be that they just were restoring dozens of mail servers and got to yours last...someone has to be last you know :)) times. If the mail server got hit by a virus however and perhaps the back up was corrupted too..it could be they were doing their best to recover what they could of corrupted files. That DOES takes time as one searches out every possibility to recover that data. If they did not have the registry key backed up..well it could take a long time to recreate all those imail domains. A virus that infected all the mail folders and could not be cleaned..would be a reason to delete all mail from those pop folders.. (this is speculation -I've never heard of a virus like that). Or, a hard drive failure could also corrupt things..but that does not seem likely as the sent mail folders were restored and a hard drive failure would likely affect everything. But still..how about that back up?? that is the question..are the mail folders backed up. That is what i would ask them. One thing I found was that using the imail back up function was pretty useless..for restore purposes. I go into regedit and export the imail keys...so that in case of disaster i can edit them as to drive letters and such before i restore. So, to me the worse case would be that 1. That server and all imail was corrupted and unfixable due to virus or hard drive failure. 2. The last backup taken included the corrupted files and so was not usable. Or, there was no back up. 3. They tried to recover whatever they could. I could see where that would take 30 hours. I would not expect them to ever admit they got hit by a virus if in fact that is what happened. As a web hosting wholesaler..that would be very hard for them to admit. This is all just speculation though. Only your provider can tell you what really happened. Personally, I make it clear to my providers, tell me the good news and tell me the bad news. In the world of IT things break, mistakes are made, problems occur. Just keep me informed on what the problem is, and how they will change their process in the future to prevent the problem from occuring again. If they make a mistake that is ok..we all do..but I need to trust them..and only by telling me what is really going on do i get that sense of trust. You may want to think about how you can manage your vendor a bit better. I'm sure they want to keep your business..so why not leverage that to get the information you need and want? What is it you actually want? A better explanation? Then ask for it! Well thanks for the opportunity to speculate and pontificate :)) Regards Kim > > Our e-mail hosting provider recently had a 30 hour outage on one server that > knocked out POP and SMTP service for about 200 of our clients and ourselves. > We know of 10 other domains that are hosted on that machine. > When service was restored, services came online in stages. POP and SMTP came Please visit http://www.ipswitch.com/support/mailing-lists.html to be removed from this list. An Archive of this list is available at: http://www.mail-archive.com/imail_forum%40list.ipswitch.com/
