Re: [Evolution] Partial Restoring of single folder into Evolution

[Ángel <angel 16bits net>]

On 2020-08-16 at 09:22 +1000, Alex Evans via evolution-list wrote:
> Hello all,
>
>
> I am new here, coming from 30 years of Windows / Outlook....
>
>
> So far, I managed to START to get my head around the diffrences, but
> gradually I see that this package is a serious contender.

Hello Alex

You are welcome.


> I am running it under Ubuntu 20.04.

I guess this means you are using the evolution 3.36.1-2?
(this is the version packaged by Ubuntu 20.04)


> I have many folders I imported from Outlook and also created a new
> folder for Linux specific items.

I guess this means these are Local folders, not folders on an account at
a remote server.
> Maybe, I made a mistake by calling the folder "Linux", but anyway -

Perhaps a term too generic, but doesn't really matter.

> the folder got corrupt 

I find this very odd. Could you tell us what makes you think so?
evolution would be saving these as separate files. It's really hard that
you would have the folder corrupted (unless perhaps a bigger issue like
the hard disk failing).
Are you sure it's not some silly thing like having some filter set which
makes some of the mails not to be shown?
(I'd start by confirming that the bar above the message list should
contain "All messages" and no filter)


> and I am trying to find what was inside it, but without doing a
> complete restore of the .tar.gz backup I made just last Thursday.
>
>
> So, I want to try and restore a single folder from this backup file
> and considering the following steps:
> 1) Unpack the backup .tar.gz file into a temporary folder
> 2) Drill down to the folder I want to restore, I found it and it has
> in it 3 sub-folders : .cur, .new, .tmp

Not exactly. It should be a folder named .Linux, with subfolders cur,
new and tmp i.e. there's a dot prefix to normal folder names but the
subfolders wouldn't have that. Probably a mistake when redacting the
email.

> 3) Grab those 3 folders and pack those into a small .tar.gz file
> 4) Import this file into Evolution
>
>
> Or, is there a better way?
>
>
> Thanks for any suggestions
> Alex


You will probably find that the new and tmp folders are empty, and the
cur folder contains all the emails (one per file).

The original folder would probably be found
at .local/share/evolution/mail/local/.Linux

This makes it easy for you to compare the emails on one and another. For
instance, diff -qr <folder1> <folder2>  will tell you the files changed,
or missing on one folder but present in the other.
Note: email flags like viewing an email are represented on the filename,
so some mails you hadn't read at the backup time would have disappeared
and a new one with a S appended added.

This lets you look, at low-level, what messages are really in the store.
You could directly copy there the missing the files from the backup.
Actually changing the internal evolution files is not really supported
(and it would be preferable to do so with the program closed!), but in
my experience it can actually deal with placing new files with no
problems, regenerating the dependent files as needed.


The interesting part would be if you *really* had the folder corrupted,
and in such case what caused it. It is unlikely that your actual emails
disappeared from the filesystem.

Best regards