Brinkster Knowledge Base

KB Home   /  Support  /  Email  /   Email Backups / Restorations
Email Backups / Restorations Articles
Email backups and restorations:

There are a few options for backups of your mailbox.
1) Automatic daily backups.
        Configured through the Brinkster Control Panel / Email Manager.
        $1 or $2 monthly - $0 to recover a mailbox

2) Brinkster disaster recovery backups.
        Managed by Brinkster **for disaster recovery purposes**.
        $0 added cost - $500 to recover per lost mailbox.


1) Automatic Daily Email Backups.

Brinkster is able to automatically backup your email accounts each day and the cost is $1 or $2 per month for each mailbox selected.
        $1 for each mailbox per month for selected Premium Email Accounts
        $2 for each mailbox per month for selected Business Professional Email Accounts

Automatic Backups of email accounts are managed through the Email Manager within your control panel. These backups can be imported to any Brinkster (Zimbra) operated mail account - not just the email account the backup was originally created for. Zimbra is the development company that created the software running Brinkster's mail systems.


If you have selected an email account for automatic backups, you will receive 14 total backups with the following schedule.
        - Daily Backups for Seven (7) Days
        - Weekly Backups for Four (4) Weeks
        - Monthly Backups for Three (3) Months

If you require historical backup storage longer than three months you will want to periodically download a copy of your email backups to a local computer. Store these backups as often and for as long as your personal / corporate policies require or are needed.

To setup Automated Daily Backups take the following steps.

1) Go to the Brinkster Email Manager and choose your Domain Name.

2) Choose Your Selected email account - accounts that are already backed up will show the backup icon.

3) Select the backups service which applies to your email account.









To download an Automated backup take the following steps.

1) Go to the Brinkster Email Manager and choose your Domain Name.

2) Choose Your Selected email account - accounts that are backed up will show the backup icon.

3) Click the "Backup Management" link.

4) Click the "Download" link next to the desired day.









To recover an Automated backup take the following steps.

1) Download the desired backup.

2) Log into your email account through webmail - https://webmail.brinkster.com/

3) Go to Preferences.

4) Choose Import / Export.

5) Browse to the backup file which you downloaded.

6) Press the "Import" button.














2) Brinkster disaster recovery backups

Brinkster creates an image-based backup of each mail server on a daily basis. In the event of a hardware, or operating system level failure, we are able to recover from these backups.

Brinkster email backups are daily disaster-recovery images of each mail server. We suggest that you keep a personal, historical backup of your email inbox. If you require historical backups you will need to follow the instructions on how to operate personal email backups. It is suggested that you DO NOT rely on Brinkster email backups to restore from any email events that occurred, Brinkster email backups should be considered as disaster-recovery.

Brinkster email backups are stored for a period of three to five days. In the event that you need a restoration of any email inbox located in the shared mail environment, there will be a $500 USD fee charged to the account before processing the request. The restoration will take 2 - 5 business days to complete due to the lengthy process involved.

Brinkster will NOT have a backup of any email if you download your mail through POP3 and delete the email from the server in the process. If you only use IMAP or Webmail to operate your email account, we will have a copy of your email inbox as it was from the past few days. Any messages that have been downloaded / deleted by the operator prior to the backup point or messages arriving after the backup point will not be located in the backups.

The $500 mailbox restoration fee is a per-mailbox fee and only applies to email. In the event that you have more than one restoration request at the same exact time and all email accounts operate from the same exact system, we can waive the restoration fee for the additional accounts residing on the same system. (2 accounts on the same system = $500. 2 accounts on different systems = $1000)

Why does Brinkster charge to restore my email?
Brinkster charges a restoration fee for email due to the lengthy process involved in restoring a mailbox. Brinkster must apply the system backup image to unused hardware and then pull the data from the system manually. This takes a lot of administrative time and the fee mitigates the cost of the administrators time during the restoration of one mailbox.