missing 12GB of mail going back 2 decades after reboot

[gene heskett]

On Wednesday, December 29, 2021 5:15:49 PM EST Ian Douglas wrote:
> On Monday, 20 December 2021 14:31:06 SAST gene heskett wrote:
> > Most of the custom filters AND FOLDERS I rebuilt were erased by a reboot
> > to install a fresh kernel. That's over 10 gigabytes of old mail,
> > carefully sorted into their own folders that some bug wiped out.
> 
> Somewhat related.
> 
> A few weeks back, had similar issue after reboot (some days after software
> update).
> 
> Trying to open a mail crashed KMail.
> 
> What I did to "fix" was rename ~/.local/share/akonadi and restart akonadi
> and kmail. I then had to redo everything (folders and filters etc, and
> copy all the mails (also decades worth) from the 100 numbered folders in
> akonadi/ file_db_data to the new folder tree (created a work directory
> there) and then rebuild my filters to sort into proper folders. Made
> quite a mess oby duplicating messages. Also lost some mail.
> 
> Tonight a similar thing happened ... akonadi destroyed my proper named
> folders and randomly put all the mail back into 100 numbered folders. WTF
> is that for?
> 
> It happened when I was fiddling with the settings on a folder that is a
> mailing list.
> 
> Anyway, your mail (mostly) is likely still on disk ... try looking in
> ~/.local/share/akonadi/file_db_data
> 
.local/share/akonadi contains 9.4Gb
and Mail contains 8Gb

from du -h scans of those two locations, neither of which has been touched 
since the reboot.

Can Import get it back and cataloged as it was before? But I've tried that 
since, and import apparently does not understand the former directory 
structure since the reboot.  So the mail seems to be there, and I have a 
backup too, but the one time I thought it might be working took nearly 3 
hours, destroyed the copy I'd given it without putting it into kmails 
database. No clue where it might have gone.

Methods of recovery that are known to work I'll try but I'm understandably 
spooky for 2 reasons, I have asked for help with this several times, getting 
one reply without procedural help from Ingo, and now you make one more 
reply.  Needless to say, the fact that no one has asked questions, or given 
any real procedural help, is giving me any great confidence in someone 
actually knowing how its supposed to work.

Questions I'll try to answer, showing the results of tests, but at this 
stage I'm not doing anything except trying to keep ahead of disappearing 
filter rules. I've had to recreate about 20 in the last 2 weeks. The target 
dir for a move into rule keeps disappearing. 

> Hope that helps.
> 
> Cheers, Ian

Thanks Ian, take care and stay well.

Cheers, Gene Heskett.
-- 
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