User:Erbingha/Restoring IMAP

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I accidently removed some important email messages from my Eos/Unity. How do I restore it?

Restoring IMAP email from a backup tape is a labor intensive and time consuming process. For this reason, unfortunately, in most cases we can only perform up to two restores per incident from tape to help retrieve your lost email. So please request your restore date(s) carefully.


Backups are made daily from a snapshot of your email folders as they existed at around 3 AM of the day the backup is made. Requesting a restore for 1/14/98, for example, will give you access to your files as they existed when you quit working on 1/13/98, the day before the backup was created.

Note that any email that was received and deleted during the interval between one days backup and the next, will not be on any backup tape, and thus, we would not be able to restore those messages.

So, we need the following information to restore your message(s) from the tape backups:

  • Your eos/Unity login name
  • The name of the folder that contained the message to be restored
  • Requested restore date - the date when the message was last known to be on the system. (Please choose carefully... you only get two tries per incident.)

Email this to accounts@ncsu.edu.

A staff member will attempt to locate a suitable copy of the folder(s), and they will be placed in a temporary directory, away from your regular email files. The procedure for accessing the restored email will be sent to you in a followup email message. You should examine the restored messages(s), and if they are the messages(s) that you need, you should copy the messages(s) from the temporary directory, back to your regular email folders. After approximately 10 days, the temporary restored folder will be removed from the system.

Restore requests are handled on a first-come, first-served basis. In most cases, the restore will be completed within three (3) business days. Given the resource intensive nature of IMAP email restores, and the lenght of time needed to accomplish them, it may be faster to request that the original sender of the email resend the lost email.

Please note that backups are only kept for 28 days. We cannot fulfill restore requests for periods beyond the 28 day interval.

--ITD