[Evolution] Migration from mbox to maildir taking for ever

[Margaret Ranken <margaret ranken exacttext com>]

I have had a Ubuntu laptop for the last 18 months or so. I installed Ubuntu 11.04 which happened to come with Evolution and I was quite happy with it.  I didn't upgrade from 11.04 until forced to because of known problems with VMware.  I have just run the upgrade to 11.10 (because 11.04 is no longer supported) and got a message saying I had to reformat my evolution files.

I said yes to that and nothing seemed to happen,but I checked the system monitor and one of the four CPUs was 100% loaded. I found a posting on a forum somewhere that suggested that all I needed to do was be patient.  That has been the case for nearly 24 hours now - I am not using the computer and just hoping to see a good result - but advice would be welcome.

There is plenty of disk space - over 400Gbytes.

Presumably, if I want to make use of the .tar file with my Evolution backup in it, I will have to re-install Ubuntu 11.04 to be able to do that?

Will the maildir format be more efficient? - I have a large volume of email traffic and Evolution was noticeably slowing down in normal use.

Hoping for help.

Margaret