267537 - VERITAS Backup vs. Thunderbird data

Status: RESOLVED INVALID

(Thunderbird :: General, defect)

Description

[Jerry Welch]

User-Agent:       Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 5.1; en-US; rv:1.7.3) Gecko/20041031 Firefox/1.0RC2
Build Identifier: 

This occured to a coworker who uses Thunderbird.  

Our company uses Veritas for automated backups.  It appears that Veritas does
not backup the actual files containing the email contents, probably because the
files do not have an extension that Veritas can recognize.  Following is his
description of what happened.

"If you're a) a PC user, b) a Thunderbird user, and c) depending on our
VERITAS backup server to back everything up, please think again.  Over
the weekend I had a system crash and needed to recover.  Everything came
back fine except user settings like my taskbar, desktop, preferences ...
and the entire contents of my Thunderbird e-mail.  The restored backup
of my Mail folder contained all of my folders and .sbd files, but none


of the files containing any actual messages, which have no extension.
IT confirms that VERITAS does not back up any file that does not have
one of its preferred extensions; open up the client, hit Properties and
then Summary to see which are on the list.  There is no way for users or
administrators to change this list, so if any file you need backed up
doesn't have an extension on this list, you are out of luck."

Reproducible: Didn't try
Steps to Reproduce:
no way to easily reproduce



Expected Results:  
when a backup client copies your data, the email files should be in a format
that will allow them to be backed up.  after a hard drive crash, the veritas
backup should be able to restore your email.

Unless there is a workaround for this, it probably means that I will have to zip
my email contents into a file, one that veritas can backup, prior to every
backup that I run on my system.

Comment 1

[Jerry Welch]

bug occured using Thunderbird version 0.8 (20040913)

OS was Windows XP SP1

Comment 2

[timeless]

please complain to veritas. this affects netscape 4 and other mbox applications.
Even if we did switch to another mail format, it's quite likely that the files
would not have a friendly extension.

Comment 3

[Doug Wright]

wontfix?