Feature request for Zextras Backup

[Bittone]

Hello guys,
one small feature request that might help ppl like me using Zextras Backup.
Many time I have ppl asking "I deleted an important e-mail, my life depends on it!" so I say " Ok, what message was that?" and I get "Hmmm... let me think... something about this project.. it came from a Tukish address, no, maybe a German one.... but it was important you MUST recover it!", and so on.
So my request is: why don't you add an advanced search fuctionality that might search inside Zextras Db in order to find specific email messages?
Not a simple task I know, but it would make a lot of sense in order to avoid undeleting hundres emails to find hust the needed one, it might even be an hook for a "self-restore" interface.
Thanks

Alberto

[d0s0n]

Hi Alberto,

you are talking about an existing zextras feature, the doItemSearch CLI command:

~$ zxsuite help backup doItemSearch

Syntax:
   zxsuite backup doItemSearch {account} [attr1 value1 [attr2 value2...]]

PARAMETER LIST

NAME                TYPE               EXPECTED VALUES            DEFAULT
account(M)          Account Name/ID                               
backup_path(O)      String                                        /opt/zimbra/backup/zextras/
id(O)               String                                        
search_string(O)    String             "Case sensitive string"    
before(O)           Date               "dd/MM/yyyy HH:mm:ss"      
after(O)            Date               "dd/MM/yyyy HH:mm:ss"      
verbose(O)          Boolean            true|false                 false

(M) == mandatory parameter, (O) == optional parameter

Usage example:

zxsuite backup doitemsearch john@example.com verbose true
Shows all of John's items, displays metadata of each message as well

This function is intentionally not present on GUI, because it's absolutely not optimized, as the backup path is not indexed (there isn't any DB inside Zextras Backup), so this operation is very I/O intensive.

Your feedback will be greatly appreciated, but before bringing this function in GUI, a whole zxbackup rewriting will be required (version 2.0).

Have a nice day!
D0s0n

[Bittone]

Hello d0s0n,
just checked the command and it worked, even if results are , on my opinion, sub-par.
Looking at the result I now understand why it would be difficult to have a clear results set since the Metadata fields holds almost all the "human interesting" informations.
More important: it searches without any order and without distinguishing between deleted (I guess are .del files) or not deleted emails.
My guess is that you will probably add everything that's potentially in there in next releases.
Just for my curiosity: did you choose to concatenate everything into a single text string instead of a DB to keep it simple or to have it ready for something like Lucene?
Thanks

Alberto

[d0s0n]

Hello d0s0n,
just checked the command and it worked, even if results are , on my opinion, sub-par.
Looking at the result I now understand why it would be difficult to have a clear results set since the Metadata fields holds almost all the "human interesting" informations.
More important: it searches without any order and without distinguishing between deleted (I guess are .del files) or not deleted emails.
My guess is that you will probably add everything that's potentially in there in next releases.

Hi Alberto,

we are very closer to release the next version, so I addressed your suggestions for version 1.8.10.

Just for my curiosity: did you choose to concatenate everything into a single text string instead of a DB to keep it simple or to have it ready for something like Lucene?
Thanks

Alberto

Also Lucene is a DB, but ZxBackup doesn't use DB at all... The text string on wich we made the search is the original "zimbra meta-data" extracted from zimbra items, as is.

D0s0n

[Bittone]

Hi d0s0n,
thanks for your kind answer.
Probably zimbra metadata is what is used Lucene, it looks so similar to something belonging to a full text search record.
I'm looking forward to see what you'll release next.
And speaking of future releases, I think there is still one module that, on my opinion, might be a good addition to your suite: an anti-spam frontend to fine tune amavisd-new and spamd (it's frustrating not o have one since I'm used to do it by CLI biut I'm afraid that doing so on Zimbra would result in my changes beeing overwritten at every restartt).

BTW, my compliments on the Zextras Mobile : works really well, even beter than Google's.

Thanks again for your patienece

Bye

Alberto