Question
Email accounts are missing, and there are no backups of the shadow and passwd files that hold the account information. How can I replace these files and regain access to my email accounts?
Answer
The best resolution is to restore the cPanel from a known good backup. This will restore the entire account including the emails to the date the backup was taken. Please review the following for instructions on how to restore from a cPanel backup:
How to restore an account from your server backups
If restoring the entire cPanel account is undesirable, the cPanel backup can be extracted to locate only the specific passwd and shadow files that you need. The files you need to replace will be located at the following path, where $user and $domain match the cPanel user and the domain name with the missing email accounts:
/home/$user/etc/$domain/shadow
/home/$user/etc/$domain/passwd
The instructions here can show you how to extract only specific files from a cPanel backup:
How to manually locate and extract a file or directory from a cPanel backup
If you do not have a backup of the account to restore from, you will need to recreate the missing accounts through the cPanel interface. The messages within the accounts should be unaffected by this process, which is documented here:
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