 Hello, everybody! Watch this video to find out how to recover electronic mail files from a post-fix mail server with DelCut, how to backup your emails, recover lost emails, and how to transfer emails to a new server or another client machine. Backup is an important part of the activity performed to maintain the server and the entire domain. Since the server is a crucial part of your network, make sure you're back up your data regularly. If something goes wrong, for example, certain equipment breaks down, you will be able to restore the server's availability using a backup copy. However, the problem in question is this. What can you do when there is no backup file, or when it's impossible to restore the server from it? In this case, a special data recovery tool, Hetman Partition Recovery, is going to save you. With its help, you'll be able to recover lost emails from your server. In today's video, I'm going to show you how to backup your files and then recover data on a client machine with the example of Thunderbird Mail Client in a Linux operating system, and how to restore emails on a server after reinstalling or formatting a hard disk, or even transfer all emails to a new server. For starters, let's explore why you can lose access to your emails. The causes behind the loss of emails can be extremely varied. However, the main factors are these. Accidental removal of a user's folder on the client machine. Server errors. Mail server breakdowns. Incorrect approaches to server administration. Loss of access to the mailbox. Or erase an important data in case of reinstalling the operating system or accidentally formatting the hard disk. Before you start looking for the lost data, you need to decide where email files can be found. As we know, all emails that reach the server are written to a certain directory and stored until they are removed. Emails are deleted from the server when you remove them from your mailbox trash folder. When a mail client is used on a client machine, the messages are stored both on the server and on the client machine, where the corresponding mail client is used. For illustration, I'll show you where user data files are stored in case of Thunderbird mail client, how to back them up and how to recover them. In a Linux operating system, Mozilla Thunderbird mail client keeps all user settings, passwords, addresses and email files on the user's client machine. When the application is launched for the first time, it creates a default directory with a path like this. This folder is hidden, so you can only view its contents in the mail client window, or you can change the settings to make hidden folders visible. Hit the menu button and check the box for show hidden files. To open this folder in the application window, go to menu, help, more troubleshooting information. In the tab that opens, find the line profile directory and click open directory. This will open the user folder in the Explorer window. In this folder, you can find the subfolders for calendar, settings, mail and so on. Mozilla Thunderbird has no built-in tools for creating a backup copy of profile data or user's corresponding files. That is why, if you need to transfer a user profile to another computer, or if your computer or its operating system fails for some reason, there are two variants to use third-party software or create a profile backup manually. To backup data, go several levels up and copy the Thunderbird folder to another drive. To see a folder with a randomly generated name is created for every user. To transfer data to another computer, you will have to copy the contents of this directory to the same folder, but on the new computer. To recover data from backup, or transfer it to another PC, install and run Thunderbird on the new computer. When launched for the first time, the application will create a new user folder with the path I have shown before. Without making any changes, just close the application, follow the path to the profile folder and replace its contents with the files from the backup. After you launch the program again, you will sign in to the old user profile and you will see all the emails that existed at the time when the backup was created. If you accidentally removed a user from a client machine, the server is out of order and you have no backup to rely on, use Hetman Partition Recovery to bring the data back. In case of a server running on a Linux operating system, you need to connect the hard disk to a Windows computer. When you start the program, it will display all hard disks connected to this computer. In the window that opens, right-click on the disk where the mail client user data was stored and select Open. After that, choose the scan type, path scan or full analysis. Run a path scan first, it will take less time. If the program can't find the missing files, then go for full analysis. Select the file system and click Next. When the scan is complete, follow the path to the directory containing user files. Select that folder and click Recovery. Choose where to save the data, the hard disk and the folder. And hit Recovery again. After that, the last step is to replace the new user files with the old items like I have shown before. When you do it, you will see all recovered messages in your inbox folder. If the program failed to restore access to the user profile and the messages are still inaccessible, you can view them in a text editor. To do it, open the inbox file. Install this path. The file you need has the name Indox. It contains all emails that were delivered to your mailbox. This way, you'll be able to receive a necessary email or view the contents of an important message. If this recovery method doesn't work, try recovering data from the server. In one of the previous videos, I have already shown you how to install and configure a Postfix server with Dovcott and where to find email files. Depending on the type of storage method applied, such files can be stored in the folder with the name var slash mail and the username if inbox is used. Alternatively, they can be stored in the folder with the name MailDeer if this type of storage method was used. The upper level of MailDeer directory contains such folders as MailDeer slash Cur, MailDeer slash New and MailDeer slash TNP. When an email is delivered, it is placed into a file stored inside the team piece up directory. The file name is formed with the use of currentime, hostname, process identifier for the process that created this file and a random digit. All of these to ensure that all file names are unique. After the email is written to the file, a link to it is created in the new directory while the current link is removed from the TNP directory. When the mail client finds a message in the new folder, it moves them to the curr folder with the help of rename because otherwise it may result in creating duplicates. While adding informative suffixes to their names, an informative suffix contains a column to separate the unique file name and the current information, the digit to, a comma and various flags. The specific digit to indicates the version of the information given after the comma. The specification determines the flags used to indicate if the message was read, deleted and so on. And they use the first letters of the following words, past, replied, seen, trashed, draft and flagged. So, new emails are sent to the new folder and after they are read, they are passed to the curr folder by renaming them and adding the suffix. To backup mail files, open the directory for a specified user and copy the message files to another disk. To recover emails from a backup, you need to transfer the email files from the backup to the new folder immediately after the transfer. You once see the messages in the client window, since some changes must be made before it's possible. To have the files displayed in the mail client, you need to add their names. Right-click on a file and choose rename. Now remove all characters after the domain name of your server. In my case, they are colon 2s. After that, open the mail client and click Get messages. After that, all the emails that were transferred from backup will appear on the inbox list with the unread status. This way, you can use files from backup to recover an accidentally deleted email or transfer email to the new server. If the server breaks down, a user is deleted accidentally, the hard disk is formatted, the operating system is reinstalled or email files are lost while there is no backup, they can still be restored with the help of Hapman Partition Recovery. If a server is running on a Linux operating system, you need to take the hard disk out of the server and connect it to a Windows computer. Then start the program and scan the connected disk. After that, follow the path where the email files were stored, select the directory or its contents and click Recovery. Then change the disk and folder where the file should be saved and click Recovery one more time. When saving them, the program will ask you to change file names since they contain a column which is not supported as a file name element by some operating system, including Windows. In this case, there is nothing to worry about. In the end, all files will be renamed anyway when copied to the server and those characters will be removed. Check the box next to Replace all unknown symbols to and click to rename them. After the recovery, the folder will contain email files and then you can transfer them to a new server. Before copying the files, the server should be configured and a user with the same name should be created. Copy the files to the new folder and edit the names as I have shown before. By removing the suffixes containing several characters, like 2s. After that, open the email client and check the mail and then click here to get messages. As you can see, we have managed to recover all messages. If, for some reason, a user permanently lost access to their senderbird profile or their profile in any other mail client, the contents of such files can be viewed in a text editor. As you open it, you'll see the original email contents, including the senders and recipients email addresses, text and other data. This way, you'll be able to retrieve the required information from the recovered emails. And that is all for now. Hopefully this video was useful. Remember to click the Like button and subscribe to our channel. Leave comments to ask questions. Thank you for watching. Good luck.