Hi,

> I'm using amanda 2.4.5 and a supported gnutar on Fedora.
> One of the servers we're backing up is a Cyrus IMAP server with a lot
> of mailboxes. Cyrus makes hard links when the same message is sent to
> multiple people (when they're on the same cyrus partition).

That sounds a strange behaviour to me: every time one user read the
message, the file is modified (Status: R added) so the hard link is
broken for that user.

> I'm trying to recover the contents of a mailbox, but it contains some
> hard links to mail messages in other mailboxes. Some of those other
> mailboxes (that contained the actual file) have been removed (deleted)
> in the past few months. The amrecover (tar actually) program complains
> that it cannot hard link to <filename> because the other mailbox/file
> doesn't exist: "tar: ./user/student5/626.: Cannot hard link to
> `./user/student2/555.': No such file or directory".

That aso sounds weird to me: a hard link is a single file sharde in
multiple directories, the file does not reside inside one directory
and is not linked from others, it is the same file under different
names.

> I'm now facing two issues:
> 
> - how can I (easily) recover the rest (I could make dummy
> directories/files, but is there an easier way)?

Short answer, if you have enough temporary disk space, restore all the
mailboxes and you should have no more missing link problems. Then you
should be able to move only the malbox of that specific user.

Best regards,

Olivier