[Mailman-Users] How to restore a subscribers list.

[Mark Sapiro]

Grant Taylor wrote:
>
>I have a backup (via BackupPC) of all Mailman files going back 30 days 
>and I'd like to know what is the proper procedure to restore an 
>individual mailing list.


The easiest way is just to copy the most recent good backup of
lists/LISTNAME/config.pck to the corresponding file on the server.

This will have some minor side effects such as resetting the issue
number of the digest and undoing any list configuration settings you
may have made in the mean time, but this is easy.

The alternative is to do something like bin/dumpdb on the backup
config.pck and extract the members from that or install it as
lists/temp_list/config.pck and then run

  bin/list_members -f -r temp_list \
  |bin/sync_members -w=yes -d=no -a=no real_list

  bin/list_members -f -d temp_list \
  |bin/sync_members -w=yes -d=yes -a=no real_list

but this will lose user option settings, digest type and passwords
(which is why you need to send welcome messages).

The former method is much cleaner as far as the users are concerned.

It would be possible to write a withlist script to retrieve only the
membership information from the backup config.pck and update the list
with it, but I'm not aware of any existing script.

-- 
Mark Sapiro <mark at msapiro.net>        The highway is for gamblers,
San Francisco Bay Area, California    better use your sense - B. Dylan