This is really a two-part problem. Recently had an Apple Mail database corruption. Tried to resolve it by recalling the Mail folder but that resulted in missing mailboxes & messages.

Then restored the entire volume after first booting from a recovery disk and after completing the restore process, the startup volume would stop loading at approximately 40% (Apple logo/gray screen, progress bar in middle of screen just stops progressing). Repeated the restore volume process a second time, with exact same results.

Was forced to revert back to a separate backup system that simply creates a duplicate of my startup volume (SuperDuper) and was able to get back in business, although wound up losing about 10 days worth of locally stored email. QRecall was able to restore virtually all of my recent files not in the duplicate, with the exception of Mail.

1) Is there a recommended method to restore Mail?
2) Any idea why my restored startup volume wouldn't boot?

Running Yosemite 10.10.5 on a MBP with a Crucial MX100 512G SSD.

Charles,

You didn't mention which version of QRecall you are using. If it's 1.2, then restoring a bootable Yosemite volume is dicey. Starting around OS X 10.10.3, Apple started adding a lot of new security requirements that a volume restored with QRecall 1.2 might not satisfy, and it's completely incapable of restoring an El Capitan system.

You did the right thing restoring the volume—boot from an external volume and restore your boot volume. Just make sure that your external volume has the same major version of OS X that you're restoring. It's often the case that an older version of OS X (10.9) will be incapable of restoring a newer version of OS X (10.10), because of new features Apple has added to the filesystem.

OK, so you've restored your boot volume and it doesn't boot. Don't worry. Starting with OS X 10.9, the best remedy is an over-install. After recalling your boot volume, boot into your OS X recovery partition and simply reinstall OS X over what you recalled. OS X is now very good about surgically reinstalling the OS. It won't overwrite any of your accounts, documents, applications, or preferences. When the install is finished, you'll have the latest OS and everything else should be intact.

Now, about capturing Mail. The Mail app uses a database. This is really difficult (read "impossible") to cleanly capture while you have Mail open. The best time to capture your mail is when the Mail app is closed.

If getting a clean capture of your mail is really important, and you're using QRecall 2.0, consider scheduling a capture of your mail folder and preferences "when Mail closes", using the new application-based event schedule. You can also have QRecall skip your hourly capture if the Mail app is open, or just hold until the Mail app closes. But if you're like me and leave your mail app open all day, that won't be of much help.

Thanks! Am using QR version 1.2.3(8) so looks like things were going down a known path :)

I actually booted into the recovery partition and started to reinstall OS X but wasn't sure this would do what you described (surgically reinstall the OS without overwriting what I was trying to save) and the time estimate was in hours...so I bailed. Next time I won't be so impatient.

My current backup scheme always starts with a re-boot so all applications are closed before the archive capture process begins. I had hoped that, once I'd copied my duplicate over I should have then been able to recall my Macintosh HD > Users > username > Library > Mail folder and Mail should be back to my last capture but that didn't work either. I was missing most of my mailboxes after the recall.

Any idea as to what I did wrong there?

Charles Stembridge wrote:Any idea as to what I did wrong there?

I honestly don't know. Mail is really scattered all over the place now. Mail accounts are defined in the system's Internet Accounts database, preferences are in several locations, etc.

I helped a friend replace the SSD drive in your iMac and we could not get Mail running again after upgrading to El Capitan. I eventually relocated the Mail folder to the desktop, deleted and recreated all of her mail accounts (that restored her IMAP mailboxes), and then imported the local mailboxes back into Mail from the copies on the desktop. That seemed to work pretty well.

If you have captured copies of your mailboxes, you could try recalling your ~/Library/Mail folder to your desktop and try recovering mailboxes manually by reimporting.

OK, that's something to try at least.

Really appreciate your help and QR!

How "beta" is 2.0? I'm hesitant to trust backups to a beta version.

Charles Stembridge wrote:How "beta" is 2.0? I'm hesitant to trust backups to a beta version.

It's actually very close to a release version. There are still some odd issues getting the scheduler run when installed, a few minor UI problems, and missing documentation. But there are currently no known issues that impact data integrity or reliability.