Restoring from a non-cPanel backup

[LoadFactor]

I'll call this account badidea.com to protect the guilty. That's not their real domain.

Quick history:
- Customer IT guy tells me they're terminating their account, moving to a new host.
- We get notified transfer is good, terminate account.
- Three days later, customer President discovers his new host isn't running cPanel & he can't manage his hosting.

He's angry about this and now we're switching back, so this is a "cPanel helped me retain a customer" story!

The bad news is that when the account terminated, cPanel rightly deleted all the backups.
The good news is that we have an external backup designed for bare metal recovery, so we have everything there -- except the cPanel backups (which are excluded to save space).

So now I need to restore this account piece by piece and I'm running into issues. I've restored /home/badideac/ with no errors. The mail is there but none of the mail accounts show up in the user's cPanel. Is there something that I need to run to get them recognized?

I'm also going to have to do this with a mySQL database, so any tips on how I can get this account 100% restored without a cpmove file would really help.

 

[cPanelMichael]

Hello

You mentioned that cPanel deleted the backup files upon account termination. This is not standard behavior. Are you sure no backup archives that were generated through the cPanel backup system exist for this account?

Thank you.

 

[LoadFactor]

Sorry for the slow response, I seem to have missed notifications for this thread.

I have double-checked. there's nothing related to this account in the /backup tree.

 

[cPanelMichael]

There is a guide here that lists where email account information is stored:

Manual Migrations from unsupported control panels

Thank you.

 

[LoadFactor]

Thanks for that document, it provided the clue -- which should have been bloody obvious to me in the first place!

I recreated the account in cPanel before restoring from backup. so the uid of the new badideac was not the same as the old restored uid and all the file permissions were messed up. Once that was fixed everything worked as expected. Duh.