email account delete by accident.

[jouwpr]

Hey all,

I will continue my search, but maybe someone has a link/answer to this.

At the emailaccount screen i tried to purge spam.. ended up the account got deleted. Any way without a recent backup to restore it ?

Would send you a early christmas present!.

 

[tillo]

If it were an idling desktop machine, I'd have suggested using some software to retrieve deleted files from non-indexed data on the disk... but since it's a server (high IO), you will probably never recover those messages.
There may be one solution, which is guessing the recent data present on a disk by watching the precise direction of the magnetic fields in a high tech laboratory, but unless your messages are worth a few hundred thousand dollars you don't want to do that.

 

[nobaloney]

And for anyone else, in the future, who might find themselves in such a predicament:

If you really need the data you deleted:

Shutdown the server IMMEDIATELY. Even seconds count on a multi-user server where files are continuously being created, edited, and deleted. If possible, pull the plug; even unmounting the drive during normal shutdown can cause more damage to the deleted files.

Then use a live distribution to reboot the server.

If the live distribution mounted the partition from which you deleted the data, immediately unmount it.

Then mount the partition from which you deleted the data, READ ONLY.

Using a USB port attach a large enough drive to copy the entire partition from which you deleted date(either SSD or a hard drive with a USB interface). Mount the drive.

Using the dd command, copy the entire partition to a file on your usb-connected drive.

Send the file (you don't need to send the physical media, but depending on the size of the file you may want to) to a data restoration company.

Perhaps they'll be able to restore the data. Get a quote first, as while not as expensive as Martino's suggestion (which is really all you can do if the drive has been run for a while after the files have been deleted), it won't be cheap.

Jeff