Re: [Evolution] Reduce size of backup file

[Milan Crha <mcrha redhat com>]

On Sun, 2019-07-21 at 09:27 -0400, Mark Parfitt wrote:
> All of my accounts are IMAP, so there is no need to copy emails as
> part of this process.

        Hi,

it depends on your Evolution version (seen for example in Help->About). 
After some version there had been stopped to store also
~/.cache/evolution/ folders, which contain all the local data stored
from remote accounts (being it IMAP, CalDAV, and so on).

> I'm trying to figure out if there's a setting I can change to create
> a smaller backup file.

Again, it depends on your Evolution version. The recent version
(3.32.x) allows to change the compression method from tar.gz to tar.xz.
It even defaulted to tar.xz, but the compression was significantly
slower. It currently remembers the last choice.

In any case, as had been suggested in other messages in this thread,
check what uses the most space in the backup file, then you can make
some actions to limit the size. For example, if the most space is used
by .local/share/evolution/mail/local/, then those are On This Computer
messages, which you can clean up in the GUI (and expunge the Trash). If
you had some older version, before the switch from mbox to maildir for
the On This Computer messages, then maybe you've still stored the
backup of the mbox data, which can be seen in Edit->Preferences->Mail
Accounts, possibly named as local_mbox or some such name, which is
probably disabled. You can delete it, if not used, to free more space
from .local/share/evolution/mail/. There are many other options, it's
hard to name them all.
        Bye,
        Milan