Question : Help recovering GroupWise Email the Hard Way

Groupwise 6.5.4 on Netware SBS 6.5...

We have a user who somehow had their file cleanup set to auto-archive (14 days ) and empty the trash (3 days) - not a good combination. Unfortunately, it appears to have gone undiscovered for quite awhile. They were pretty important emails, so we're going to try and recover as much as possible. We backup for Disaster recovery, rather than archiving, so the oldest full backup is 3 weeks old, which should allow us to recover 5 weeks worth of emails at best...

What I don't know is how to identify which files/folders in the PO directories would contain a specific user's data, and how to properly recover those emails from the backups without screwing up their current account.

Answer : Help recovering GroupWise Email the Hard Way

Next, get the user out of GroupWise. This includes Notify. If they have granted anyone Proxy access to their mailbox, advise those people to stay out of the mailbox (they can still use their own).

Open up ConsoleOne (with the GroupWise Snap-Ins, of course). Expand the GroupWise System and browse to the Post Office where this user is located, and find them in the right-hand pane. Right-click on their account and select GroupWise Utilities and then Mailbox/Library Maintenance.

When the Maintenance tool's window opens, in the Action pulldown, select Re-create User Database. On the Logging tab below that, I generally select Verbose Logging. Then click Run. I'm assuming here that your account is designated as an Administrator of the system and you'll automatically receive a copy of the report generated by this process.

Wait until you receive the report, and then have the user open up GroupWise. All the recovered E-Mail will now be in the Mailbox (other item types are recovered as well, and appear in their respective default views, like the Calendar).

Have the user go thru this and see if they have recovered everything they want. If so, mission accomplished, explain to them how to properly use the Trash functions and go home. If not, we can work on recovery from backup.