Bug 752523

Summary:	Evolution backup/restore problems
Product:	[Fedora] Fedora	Reporter:	Victor Ion Munteanu <victor.munteanu>
Component:	evolution	Assignee:	Matthew Barnes <mbarnes>
Status:	CLOSED INSUFFICIENT_DATA	QA Contact:	Fedora Extras Quality Assurance <extras-qa>
Severity:	low	Docs Contact:
Priority:	unspecified
Version:	16	CC:	lucilanga, mbarnes, mcrha
Target Milestone:	---
Target Release:	---
Hardware:	x86_64
OS:	Linux
Whiteboard:
Fixed In Version:		Doc Type:	Bug Fix
Doc Text:		Story Points:	---
Clone Of:		Environment:
Last Closed:	2012-12-11 10:46:50 UTC	Type:	---
Regression:	---	Mount Type:	---
Documentation:	---	CRM:
Verified Versions:		Category:	---
oVirt Team:	---	RHEL 7.3 requirements from Atomic Host:
Cloudforms Team:	---	Target Upstream Version:

Description Victor Ion Munteanu 2011-11-09 18:42:20 UTC

Description of problem:
I've backed up my emails in Fedora 15. Installed Fedora 16. Tried to import. Backup file was corrupt. This is not the first time this happened. Last time i lost 1 weeks worth of emails, now I've lost 2 months worth of emails (that was the last backup that worked for me).

Can you please choose archivers that are easier to repair? There aren't many tools to repair gzip archives or tar files.

Comment 1 Milan Crha 2011-11-10 07:12:05 UTC

Thanks for a bug report. Do I understand this correctly that the .tar.gz file itself was corrupted, thus even other software like Archive Manager was unable to decompress it? If yes, then that's really weird to me.

Comment 2 Victor Ion Munteanu 2011-11-13 21:59:47 UTC

Well, let me explain. I've been using Evolution since 2002 as POP3 email client. So till now I have gathered quite the email count. I do monthly backups just to be safe. I recently upgraded to Fedora 16. Did 1 backup and after reinstall tried to import and failed.

Now, in the past week I've managed to recover most of my emails by composing data from various backups. Today I did a backup of everything.

This is the result of trying to extract the files from the backup:

[nemros@arrakis Downloads]$ tar -xzf evolution-backup-20111113.tar.gz 

gzip: stdin: invalid compressed data--format violated
tar: Unexpected EOF in archive
tar: Unexpected EOF in archive
tar: Error is not recoverable: exiting now

Please note that the archive was around 1.6 GB and the resulting partial .local folder had 1.3 GB.

The sad part is that some backups were successfully extracted. I then added the missing emails in the maildir and the recompressed them. Evolution would give me the invalid backup message.

This was so frustrating that I decided to keep all my emails online so I pushed them all via IMAP to one account. I hope they will be ok online.

Maybe I did something wrong, I'm not sure. Hope my explanation helps.

Comment 3 Milan Crha 2011-11-14 08:54:03 UTC

I do not think you could do anything wrong. The only thing, what I can think of, is getting out of space on the device where the backup is composed, which truncates it. When you run evolution from a console and try to do the backup, will there be any console message indicating an error during compression?

Comment 4 Victor Ion Munteanu 2012-12-11 10:46:50 UTC

I've closed this bug because I could not provide enough data and it is no longer valid.