Re: [Evolution] cron job to backup old mail

[Not Zed <notzed ximian com>]

On Fri, 2004-08-20 at 08:10 -0400, Jason Cooper wrote:
> I'm attempting to get my old email under control.  I have about 450M in
> an 'OldMail' folder in evolution.  It's stored in mbox format.  
>
> If I tar up the entire 'OldMail' directory which includes this list:
>
> total 427933
> -rw-r--r--  1 jcooper users        86 Oct 10  2003 folder-metadata.xml
> -rw-------  1 jcooper users        95 Aug 18 12:51 local-metadata.xml
> -rw-------  1 jcooper users 434518823 Aug 19 15:24 mbox
> -rw-------  1 jcooper users    762091 Aug 19 15:24 mbox.ev-summary
> -rw-------  1 jcooper users    928768 Aug 19 15:24 mbox.ibex.index
> -rw-------  1 jcooper users   1550676 Aug 19 15:24 mbox.ibex.index.data
>
> Can I just remove it?  Will evolution barf on it disappearing?  Also,
> later down the road, if I copied it back into place, would evolution
> recognize it correctly?
>
> I guess the point I'm really trying to get at is this.  Does evolution
> rely solely on the contents of this directory to tell it what mail is
> there?
Yes.

If its running it may have some of it in memory, so to be safe don't change it while it's running, but if it isn't running you can remove all of that (mbox, local-metadata.xml and folder-metadata.xml are critical, the others are just generated from the mbox file - but they are small enough you may as well include all of them).

In reality if you visit a folder then move to another folder, the one you moved away from will be fully stored on disk.  If you then move all the files the folder will still 'be there' in the application until you restart, but as soon as you try to read a message it should automatically re-scan and discover nothing.

> Usually I would just experiment, but this data is too critical. :(

Well remember if you backup the physical data you'll always be able to get it back, even if you had to import it as an mbox file manually (but you shouldn't need to do that).