I’m working on a migration where we’re moving users one by one from a production environment to a dev environment. To oversimplify, the process is:
- backup in production,
- zmbackupquery -lb to make sure the backup has finished,
- copy the files from /opt/zimbra/backup to the dev environment and
- restore there.

So:
zmbackup -f -z -a user@domain.com
then

$ zmrestore -c -lb full-20100527.153703.317 -a user@domain.com
Error occurred during restore. Check logs for more details.
The following accounts have not been restored:
  user@domain.com

A look at mailbox.log reveals:

com.zimbra.cs.account.AccountServiceException: no such account: ef423485-424b-4fec-a064-f797ffc4ae29
ExceptionId:btpool0-116://localhost:7071/service/admin/soap/RestoreRequest:1274974984703:209afa27e2965ffa
Code:account.NO_SUCH_ACCOUNT
	at com.zimbra.cs.account.AccountServiceException.NO_SUCH_ACCOUNT(AccountServiceException.java:177)
	at com.zimbra.cs.mailbox.Mailbox.getAccount(Mailbox.java:515)
...

“ef423485-424b-4fec-a064-f797ffc4ae29″ is presumably a zimbraid. I can’t for the life of me figure out where it originates–I can’t find it anywhere in either environment.

The workaround is surprisingly straightforward. Instead of the zmrestore above, restore to a restored_ account and rename the account:

$ zmrestore -c -ca -pre restored_ -lb full-20100527.153703.317 -a user@domain.com
$ zmprov ra restored_user@domain.com user@domain.com