Restoring the ".latest" symlink created when RoundCube is updated as the database results in the next update backing up the symlink instead of the database

Symptoms

When RoundCube is updated, a backup of the current RoundCube database is created first.  To help identify which is the latest backup, a symlink to the latest backup is created like:

test.rcube.db.latest -> test.rcube.db.1735000215

If this `.latest` symlink is ever restored to be the user's actual RoundCube database, then future updates will backup the symlink instead of the actual database.  This can cause a situation where there are no backups available for the RoundCube database, as all backups are symlinks that point to the same file.

Description

When RoundCube performs an update, the current database is simply copied to a new location with the suffix of the current date; older backups are then removed.  If the current database is instead a symlink, then the symlink is copied instead of the database.

We've opened an internal case for our development team to investigate this further. For reference, the case number is CPANEL-46179. Follow this article to receive an email notification when a solution is published in the product. 

Workaround

Do not restore the `.latest` symlink, or any symlink, as a user's RoundCube database.  Instead, restore the actual database file if a restore is needed.  Using the above example, instead of restoring test.rcube.db.latest, the file test.rcube.db.1735000215 should be restored.

If there are no available backups for the RoundCube database, then the database file will need to be retrieved from the account's backups.

How to manually locate and extract a file or directory from a cPanel backup