cjsimmons.net

Well, I’ve just learnt a very important lesson. I was in my webmail the other day (which I never really use), and somehow I managed to delete my entire inbox. Yes, all my emails in my inbox are now gone!!

I’ve been hosting my own mail server for the past couple of year, and its been great. It’s gone through many changes from server software, to the biggest being a move from Windows Server 2003 to Ubuntu Server, and I managed to keep all my emails over that time.

Basically, what happened was I was in webmail and in the trash directory, and when to empty it, when I think it didn’t load properly and I was still in the inbox, and telling it to empty the trash, actually emptied the inbox. I’m not sure how that happened, but it did.

I’ve tried a few ways to reclaim the data, but so far to no avail. I’m going to continue trying so if anyone know how to recover data on a ext3 drive, do let me know. I’m currently trying a program called ext3grep, but it’s pretty confusing. I’m just hoping that I can get some or all of the data back, but worst case, I’ve got a clean inbox to start fresh again.

Oh, and it was only my inbox that was emptied. All other directories are still there. Now I just need to figure out a backup solution so if this happens again, I can easily recover my data.