Re: [Evolution] Feature Request?

[Not Zed <notzed ximian com>]

On Fri, 2002-06-28 at 02:50, Jeffrey Stedfast wrote:
> On Thu, 2002-06-27 at 10:51, Steve Chaney wrote:
> > I could be asking a dumb or previously asked question, but...
> >
> > Is it possible to:
> > a) automate (within Evolution) the process of backing up one's settings
> > and email and vfolders, etc., etc., into a file which evolution can auto
> > recover lost data if needed be? (I do this already, manually, with
> > scripts. I'm just theenking of the less savvy user.)
>
> this is most easily done with cron. Just write a script to copy
> ~/evolution to another location.

i.e. to answer your question: no.

> > b) compress the mail files and whatnot, with gzip or bzip2, so as to
> > save up on disk space? Then uncompress on the fly during file-read?
> > (Would this constantly and forever eat up cpu power/time or RAM?)
>
> No, but I suppose it could be written. Not really sure how bad
> performance would be, probably extremely bad on mbox formatted mailboxes
> but might not be so bad with Maildir?

It probably wouldnt' be too bad, or even particularly hard to implement,
you could reuse most of the mbox/maildir code, with a bit of a tweak. 
Maildir the performance would be better, but the gains would be less.

If libz provides a seek interface it would be ok, and perhaps if we
opened folders readonly too, otherwise it would be a lot slower.

I've been mulling over the idea of an archive/offline folder that could
be brought 'online' to view it, and then thrown away afterwards. 
Compression would probably fit nicer in that model, rather than always
storing it compressed in active folders.