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Subject: Re: Recovering form Citadel DB crash
If you don't have a backup, then I'm afraid you're out of luck. When you deleted the write-ahead logs you deleted the very thing that makes the database recoverable. Berkeley DB is exceptionally stable but obviously it can't re-create data that isn't there.
If there's something in those files that you really need, you might be able to use your system's "strings" utility to dump them into a text file, but the chances of recovering them back into Citadel is essentially zero.
I'm trying to be gentle here because you're clearly a loyal Citadel user and I appreciate that immensely, but your database is definitely unrecoverable and you have to start over.
actually, Gemini has been helping with Berkely and Citadel and we have managed to extract the emails from the database tables and import them back in with IMAP. It's taking a while but a least I have most of what I need back. I also managed to scrape the tasks and contacts etc.
If you don't have a backup, then I'm afraid you're out of luck. When you deleted the write-ahead logs you deleted the very thing that makes the database recoverable. Berkeley DB is exceptionally stable but obviously it can't re-create data that isn't there.
If there's something in those files that you really need, you might be able to use your system's "strings" utility to dump them into a text file, but the chances of recovering them back into Citadel is essentially zero.
I'm trying to be gentle here because you're clearly a loyal Citadel user and I appreciate that immensely, but your database is definitely unrecoverable and you have to start over.
Subject: Re: Recovering form Citadel DB crash
Glad to hear it. That's why I suggested using "strings" but if you can find other tools that work, that's good too. Like I said, you can probably scrape the text out of the files, there's just no way to recover directly back into a live database.
If you've just created a brand new installation of Citadel from the latest version, and started with a blank directory, you're actually not even using Berkeley DB anymore. Look in the data/ directory ... if you see "data.mdb" and "lock.mdb" instead of the same files you've seen before, congratulations, you're on LMDB!
Going forward, I'd like to remind everyone that the best ways to back up Citadel are:
1. If you have a filesystem that does snapshots, take a snapshot and back that up.
2. If you don't, you should shut down Citadel Server before beginning a backup.
<osborne> By the way, the new UI is just days away from feature complete, and I can't wait to show it to you! </osborne>