How to retrieve old e-mails that were kept in Roundcube's inbox from a backup?

[papakota]

Hello! I've got Ubuntu 16.04 (Desktop Ed.) For my e-mail I run SMTP server (Postfix/Dovecot/Roundcube). Once in awhile I do a bare metal backup of the whole system with Clonezilla (plus a tarball file backup too just in case). Since it takes rather long time, I often just do a backup of my www directory structure plus databases that I backup from within PHPMyAdmin. Including roundcube.sql file too. "Roundcube" folder proper resides in one of my sites' (I've got a few of them on one physical machine) public_html directories. ALSO... and that's probably a crucial thing here... I have a content of "mail" folder which itself a sub-directory of another folder named after a user in the system (that I use as a login in webmail interface of RC). I think I created it manually when I was installing Roundcube a few months ago. In that "mail" folder I have ".imap" subfolder too with "INBOX", "INBOX.Sent", "Trash" and other folders too. So I think that basically I've got it all as a backup. That's what I thought... So when my HDD died a few days ago, I easily re-created everything from a Clonezilla image made a little over one month ago. BUT... When I go to RC's Inbox now... I only see the e-mails that were there back then (i.e., a month ago, and not the recent ones!) Import of roundcube.sql doesn't help. I still have those recent emails missing... I want to somehow retrieve them or at least to have access to my recent emails (the ones that were in RC's Inbox AFTER the Clonezilla backup had been made).

[JohnDoh]

Roundcube does not store any messages, they are held on the IMAP server - in your case Dovecot. Check your Dovecot config to find the storage location.

[papakota]

Thanks! You're right. Just to dot the i's and cross the t's... Ironically enough, I made all the backups except for the messages that were kept in RC (well, technically somewhere in Dovecot). My mistake was... I didn't make the backup of ALL www folder. Just its subfolders where my sites' files were. There was a folder "HTML" under www in which Dovecot kept my messages in "Mail" folder...