Email "homes" directory permissions mangled and MySQL grant issue after Virtualmin to Virtualmin restore

[vander.host]

SYSTEM INFORMATION
Ubuntu 20.04	REQUIRED
1.973	REQUIRED
6.16	REQUIRED
MySQL 5.5 + MySQL 8	RECOMMENDED

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I’m having an impossible time restoring a Virtualmin to Virtualmin backup.

We have a paid unlimited license and I tried to “Submit Support Ticket” but it failed:

Sending support ticket to virtualmin.com …
… failed with HTTP error : HTTP/1.1 404 Not Found

Here is the problem:

On the source server I only selected:

• Server’s home directory and web pages
• Mail/FTP users and mail aliases

When I restore the error is:

Restore failed : SQL grant all on taloomaxyz_db.* to 'xyzrshack'@'localhost' with grant option failed : You are not allowed to create a user with GRANT

The aborted backup has the following effect on the homes directory, in that users are intertwined with other virtual server users, and sometimes numeric:

root@server:/home/xyzshsackdand/homes# ls -lah
total 28K
drwxr-xr-x  7 xyzshsackdand                xyzshsackdand 4.0K Jan  6  2020 .
drwxr-x--- 13 xyzshsackdand                xyzshsackdand 4.0K Aug  8 11:23 ..
drwxr-x---  4 admin@xyzshsackdand.co.za    xyzshsackdand 4.0K Aug  6  2018 admin
drwxr-x---  4 xyzshack                     xyzshsackdand 4.0K Aug  6  2018 gearshack
drwxr-x---  6 peet@xyzshsackdand.co.za     xyzshsackdand 4.0K Aug  6  2018 pedro
drwxr-x---  4 martin@random.co.za          xyzshsackdand 4.0K Aug  6  2018 peet_savic_gear
drwxr-x---  4                         2814 xyzshsackdand 4.0K Dec 23  2019 sales

For example, see the @random.co.za user, and the 2814 user. Those respectively should be:

peet_savic_gear and sales@xyzshsackdand.co.za

My synopsis is that:

1. Virtualmin ignores that I didn’t specify MySQL. I was explicit about not doing a MySQL backup nor restore yet it always tries to and fails.

2. Virtualmin has issues converting a MariaDB 5.5 database to a MySQL 8 database due to the new grant permission changes in MySQL 8 and is unable to recover.

3. Due to an aborted backup user permissions end up being wrong causing mission critical email failures.

I’ve done around 260 backups and restores from 4 servers over the last thee months and this problem keeps on cropping up. Its rare, but when it happens I really struggle to recover.

In some instances I was able to use chown to manually assign the correct permissions, but for this one domain it fails as the user simply isn’t there.

Please assist.