OPPS Fastmail deleted my contacts and notes

[davidoco]

I've been a FM full email user for over 10 years and I should know better but

24th September - renewal due - I couldn't as my cc cards were hacked
23th Oct - FM email me to say account will be deleted soon
12th November - account deleted (3 weeks later)

So your account will be deleted at about 50 days after non renewal.

OK so I resigned up and asked for emails to be restored - that's ok - phew

I then asked for contacts/notes to be restored - sorry but they don't keep a backup of contacts and/or notes https://www.fastmail.com/html/?MSign...57389*88da7b29

What size could a contact list be 300 or 400 kb and it's poor form not to be making backups of them.

[steventay]

Originally Posted by davidoco

I've been a FM full email user for over 10 years and I should know better but

24th September - renewal due - I couldn't as my cc cards were hacked
23th Oct - FM email me to say account will be deleted soon
12th November - account deleted (3 weeks later)

So your account will be deleted at about 50 days after non renewal.

OK so I resigned up and asked for emails to be restored - that's ok - phew

I then asked for contacts/notes to be restored - sorry but they don't keep a backup of contacts and/or notes https://www.fastmail.com/html/?MSign...57389*88da7b29

What size could a contact list be 300 or 400 kb and it's poor form not to be making backups of them.

this is bad review for them

[rharha]

They have everything backed when an account is active, including notes and contacts. I think what support meant was that it's not restorable after account deletion.

In this case you have noone to blame but yourself. You had a lot of time to export your contact list.

[robn]

Originally Posted by davidoco

What size could a contact list be 300 or 400 kb and it's poor form not to be making backups of them.

That's not entirely true. Contacts and notes are (currently) stored in the MySQL database. We have system-level backups for disaster recovery purposes, but we don't have user-level backups.

So doing a single-user restore is a fairly complicated process - we need to restore a database backup for a specific date to a sandbox database, extract your contacts and notes from it (across multiple tables), and then bring them back into the main database.

Its a request that comes up so rarely that we've never created tooling to assist with the process, so its easily a day's work to complete the task.

Once CardDAV is released, your contact data will be stored in your mail spool (just like calendar) and so per-user backups and restores will be possible. We're also intending to move notes into into the mail spool as well as some point, so again, user-level backups will be available.

[danieldk]

Originally Posted by steventay

this is bad review for them

How so? From the website:

Beyond the protection of our redundant live servers, we also maintain a backup system which takes nightly backups of all your email and mailbox activity. If any emails are deleted, the backup will keep a copy for up to 7 days.

Also:

After your subscription ends, we will send a reminder message roughly once a week. If the subscription is not renewed soon, sending email is disabled for your account. If the account is still not renewed, then access to the account is disabled and, eventually, the entire account is deleted, including all stored messages.

He let the renewal lapse and waited some more. I would be more worried if they kept all data for a long time .

[randian]

Originally Posted by robn

That's not entirely true. Contacts and notes are (currently) stored in the MySQL database.

If you store them in the mail spool instead won't that make them a lot slower to access, update, or search? As I recall that was one of the issues Runbox had with integrating Roundcube. It was a lot slower than RMM6 because the latter used a database backend for high performance rather than a standard mail spool.

[ioneja]

Originally Posted by danieldk

How so? From the website:
He let the renewal lapse and waited some more. I would be more worried if they kept all data for a long time .

Exactly. Sorry the OP guy had trouble, but he did let his account lapse well beyond any expectation that it could be fully restored. Any longer, and I wouldn't want FM to keep ANY of my data.

[robn]

Originally Posted by randian

If you store them in the mail spool instead won't that make them a lot slower to access, update, or search? As I recall that was one of the issues Runbox had with integrating Roundcube. It was a lot slower than RMM6 because the latter used a database backend for high performance rather than a standard mail spool.

Aggressive caching is the answer. For CardDAV, when you make a change to your contacts, we compile them all into a single JSON structure, and we serve that directly to the web client.

[randian]

Originally Posted by robn

Aggressive caching is the answer. For CardDAV, when you make a change to your contacts, we compile them all into a single JSON structure, and we serve that directly to the web client.

So updates are going to slow down, in proportion to how many contacts you have. Change/add is the least frequent operation though.

[robn]

Originally Posted by randian

So updates are going to slow down, in proportion to how many contacts you have. Change/add is the least frequent operation though.

No, there's caching at higher layers too. In the AJAX client all the updating is done locally and then pushed to the server in the background, so that will be as fast as ever. In Classic it will commit the change to the backend, update the in-memory cache, and do the JSON cache rebuild in the background. The backend write isn't any slower than the database anyway; Cyrus is ridiculously fast at accepting and storing files.

Its one of the advantages of building and managing our whole stack. We can find bottlenecks in the middle and fix them in a way that you can't as easily if you're just bolting together off-the-shelf software.