<<< Date Index >>>     <<< Thread Index >>>

Re: Archiving mbox messages - any good utilities?



Chris, et al --

...and then Chris Green said...
% 
% I know this is slightly off topic as it's not *directly* related to
% mutt but maybe people here can point me in the right direction.

*grin*


% 
% I read my mail on a user account on an ISP's linux box using mutt, I
% have a reasonable but not unlimited quota there.  I would like to
% backup my mail on my home machine where I have lots of 'free' disk
% space.

Makes sense (but do you have a tape backup at home? :-)


% 
% My ideal backup would be a directory structure the same as I maintain
% on the ISP's Linux machine but with all mail that I have ever saved in
% mailbxes.  If this (sort of) mirrors my 'live' mail then I can delete
% old mail from the live mail mailboxes secure in the knowledge that the
% originals are on my home mcahine backup.

There's the trick.  I think that that requirement is going to make things
very difficult.  How will your copy method know whether you meant to
delete that message or not?

What I do is to use unison, a slightly smarter rsync, to mirror my remote
tree on my home server.  It is clever about only copying the changed bits
and so data transfer is small, and I thus have an identical copy of "there"
over "here".

Then, when I want to remove an archive from "there", I move it out of the
tree "here" (into a different tree, of course).  Unison notices and
removes the remote copy for me.  After I've built up the archive again
(just a compressed mbox file; I don't bother with splitting apart by year
or month) I do the same thing, this time appending the new archive to the
old one.


HTH & HAND

:-D
-- 
David T-G                      * There is too much animal courage in 
(play) davidtg@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx * society and not sufficient moral courage.
(work) davidtgwork@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx  -- Mary Baker Eddy, "Science and Health"
http://justpickone.org/davidtg/      Shpx gur Pbzzhavpngvbaf Qrprapl Npg!

Attachment: pgpjNlClrb3Jp.pgp
Description: PGP signature