"ADSM: Dist Stor Manager" <ADSM-L AT VM.MARIST DOT 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.