cctech Digest, Vol 92, Issue 21

On 2011-04-13 19:00, cctech-request at classiccmp.org wrote: Something like what my ISP did to me a while ago. The web/mail/database server they provided decided to self-destruct, taking down among other things, email for the whole family. It took them about a week to find out that the server was beyond repair, and transfer all accounts to a new machine - of course they changed its name at the same time. I asked them to restore all mail from the old one, goodness knows what would have happened to it otherwise. It turned out that "restoring" mail meant dumping a gazillion files with strange names in some directory structure specific to the old mail system. The databases ended up as SQL scripts. Of course I changed providers, and had to spend a couple of weeks downloading the mail files, importing them into Thunderbird and moving them to the new server. Thankfully all the files were RFC-822 format, but I still had to rename them all. Thank goodness for bulk renaming utilities. I didn't want to rename them in place in case I messed up so I had to do it all in Windows. All this work I would still have had to do if I had stayed with the old provider, of course. Obviously, paying a provider to manage a server and do backups etc doesn't necessarily mean they do it very well. /Jonas