Re: [Evolution] Corrupted backup TAR archives

[Pete Biggs <pete biggs org uk>]

> Recently, I've noticed that my Evolution backups (Evo v.3.2.3, openSuse
> 12.1) have been varying in sizes, (6.9GB-8.3GB) and the produced
> archives have been reported as corrupt when I've tried to expand them
> into a new account.

Are you short of disk space or something like that?

There's an evolution-backup executable that actually does the backing up
- perhaps you can run that manually from the command line to see if
there are any errors.  Please note that you need to shutdown Evo
completely before running it by executing 'evolution --force-shutdown'.


> I've also tried copying my entire home directory to a different machine
> running Evolution 3.4.4 with no success regarding historic email
> contents.

That *should* work, so long as you copy everything (including hidden
directories) to a virgin account - i.e. don't run Evo before you copy
the files over and make sure the account is completely quiescent (i.e.
not logged in, no gconf running etc. etc.)  The first time you run Evo
it will upgrade your configuration and folders to the latest format (I
think going from 3.2 to 3.4 some of the config was moved from Gconf to
Dconf, but I'm probably wrong!)


> I have also tried
> importing /home/user/.local/share/evolution/mail/local_mbox/Inbox into
> Evolution directly and was partially successful with the Inbox contents
> from 2003-January 2012 copying, but January 2012 to current not copying.

I suspect that Jan 2012 was when you upgraded your OS.  More recent
versions of Evo use maildir storage for local mail, not mbox.  When Evo
is upgraded it will automatically translate your old mbox files to
maildir but keep your old mbox files in the 'local_mbox' folder.  So
that folder will hold all your mail, in mbox format, until the date you
updated the software, but nothing after that.  

> Curiously, the installation that I'm trying to pull the backups from can
> read and search the 2003 - 2013 emails with no problem. 

They are stored in maildir format in .local/share/evolution/mail/local 

> I'd really like to do a complete backup of my 2003-2013 emails for
> migration to a new machine at some point. Is there a better low level
> method to do a backup and restore? Should everything in the inbox be
> restored when I
> import /home/user/.local/share/evolution/mail/local_mbox/Inbox? 

No. 

P.