Zimbra mailbox migration completed but user permissions are missing

[Thomasfrank01]

Hi everyone,

A few days ago, I migrated our Zimbra server to new hardware and transferred all mailboxes successfully. Email, calendars, and contacts were restored, but some users reported that their shared mailbox permissions were no longer working.
I checked the accounts and found that the mailbox data was intact, but the sharing settings needed to be recreated manually.
For anyone who has migrated Zimbra recently, what is the best way to preserve mailbox sharing and permissions during a full migration? Would you use native backup/restore tools or another method?

Thanks for sharing your experience.
Cool Games

[Klug]

How did you "migrate"?

[L. Mark Stone]

FWIW, over the past year I've been using scripts to help me migrate FOSS > NE customers. As a Zimbra VAR, I'd sell a FOSS customer an NE license, but because Zimbra no longer produces FOSS binaries, the old in-place "run the NE installer on the FOSS server" migration method Zimbra no longer supports.

Over the past recent months, I collapsed my various scripts into a single customer-specific Go binary (with help from a Claude Max Plan...) that migrates almost everything except the mail blobs. We use IMAPSYNC for that, and the migration binary creates the IMAPSYNC scripts, with the proper per-user exclusions to support folder sharing.

I released under an MIT License a separate script that cleans up broken shares, which anyone can run any time (and probably should).

The README (really the Operator Guide) for the migration binary and the share cleanup script is here: https://github.com/LMStone510/mce-migra ... eparations. The marketing web page is here: https://www.missioncriticalemail.com/zi ... made-easy/

To support a BSP customer, in the latest rev of the migration binary we can now specify to migrate only selected domains.

There are lots of other good migration methodologies; I've used the (c) rsync method successfully many times: https://wiki.zimbra.com/wiki/Steps_To_R ... tion_steps

I periodically needed a more flexible tool and it seems others do too. Anyway, the migration binary cares not one whit what version of Zimbra you are running, provided it's 8.8.15 or higher (might work with earlier versions, but totally untested), nor; what operating systems the source and destination systems are running, nor; the server topology differences (if any) between the source and destination systems, nor; what flavor of Zimbra (FOSS or NE) the source and destination systems are running.

Hope that helps,
Mark