Someone deleted the wrong account. The customer calls with no site and no email, and every minute counts. An email and website account is deleted from the server. With the Salvo backup on the storage, how long does it take to come back, and does it come back the same? Does it matter whether it is restored from the panel or the command line?
Why it matters to whoever runs the server
- About 2 minutes from deleted account to account back (2 min 09 s from the command line, 1 min 51 s from the panel): the account is back with the customer still on the phone.
- 23,174 messages out of 23,174: not one message lost.
- The screen shows which backup the account came from, what came back and what the server felt: the admin answers the customer with data, not with “it should all be there”.
| Command line | Panel | |
|---|---|---|
| Fetch from storage and assemble the account | 1 min 14 s | 1 min 04 s |
| Restore on the server | 49 s | 42 s |
| Total, from deleted account to account back | 2 min 09 s | 1 min 51 s |
| Email messages | 23,174 of 23,174 | 23,174 of 23,174 |
| Mailboxes and domains | 14 and 2 | 14 and 2 |
| Warnings | none | none |
On the Salvo screen
Method
One real email and website account: about 26 thousand files, 2 domains and 14 mailboxes with 23 thousand messages, no database.
The backup job was created from the Salvo panel and ran twice: first with the “Run now” button (15 s) and then, incrementally, from the command line (6 s). The backup goes to a network storage, compressed.
Before the “disaster”, we took a snapshot of the account: size and hash of every file.
The account was deleted from the server and restored from the backup, first from the command line; then it was deleted again and restored from the panel.
Result, separating customer files (website, uploaded files and messages) from those the system recreates on its own (mail server indexes, panel caches, logs and temporary files): 23,238 of 23,272 customer files identical to the snapshot (99.85%). The 34 that differ: 19 emails that reached the account after the backup, so they were not in it, and 15 files the panel rewrites on restore (the PHP version in .htaccess, php.ini and .user.ini, and the converted webmail database). No message that was in the backup was missing. From the panel and the command line, the result was the same, with the same record of what happened.
What we decided
On the restore screen, the admin sees which backup the account came from, what was in the backup and what came back, item by item, how long each step took and what the server felt (CPU, load, disk and inodes), in charts. The history keeps every restore, to compare over time.