System Status - Recovering from Email Failure
Last updated Monday, 10/07/02 at 1pm
Mail service restarted
Due to a serious hardware failure on Tuesday evening, September
17, basic email service on Drexel's central mail.drexel.edu server
was interrupted but resumed the following evening, Wednesday, September
18. The backlog of mail waiting to be delivered after the failure
cleared out overnight Thursday 9/19. Currently mail is being delivered
as it arrives. All users can log in to read and send email. The
Exchange email server was unaffected.
Old messages being restored
Mail that was in already stored in user mailboxes prior to the
system crash is still in the process of being restored from backup.
Mail from July 2001 to the present already has been restored. We
are now working on the restoration of mail from before July 2001.
What Happened
The server crashed during a backup, making that backup unusable.
The most recent valid backup -- made over Friday September 14th
through Saturday September 15th -- has since been restored. This
backup covers email from July 2001 forward.
It took nearly a week of continuous processing -- Thursday morning
9/19 through Wednesday morning 9/25-- to restore all of the email
from the backup tapes.
Please note that any mail that may have arrived in your mailbox
AFTER the last completed backup but BEFORE the system crash would
not be recoverable from backup tape. Any such mail items that you
had not retrieved to your local PC would be lost.
(Click
here for the general system status page.)
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