[H-GEN] chestnut

Russell Stuart russell at stuart.wattle.id.au
Thu Mar 27 17:00:06 EST 2003


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On Fri, 2003-03-28 at 03:58, Bruce Campbell wrote:
> work if mbox files are used (really, it does), and (but wait, theres more)
> you have the possibility of using a remote machine to store the data.

Ok, I admit it - the rsync solution would work with mbox's.  "Won't not
work" was an unfortunate choice of words.  But then Sandra's original
solution works too, and yet everybody is trying to improve it!  What is
more, Sandra's solution is the simplest posted so far and probably the
easiest to use.

The improvement David's solution offered is that it reduced the disk
space used by not backing up unmodified files.  Since it appears that
space is an issue (a wild guess on my part mind you) this is good. 
David's solution would work for maildir storage because each email is
stored in a separate file.  An mbox on the other hand is modified every
time an email is received, deleted or modified.  This means that more
than likely every mbox will be modified every day, since most people
receive at least one email a day.  So for the mbox's David's solution
would not actually save any space, while being being more complex than
Sandra's solution.

> I'm faintly surprised that no-one has mentioned the possibility of using
> CVS or RCS to store the old version of the mail files.  Apart from needing

cvs will sprinkle CVS directories everywhere.  Depending on what mail
box format is in that may be a problem.  I did not want to make the
assumption - I was trying to offer a solution that I was fairly certain
would work in Sandra's case.  As it was my diff/path suggestion had
already assumed an ASCII based format was in use and I did not like
that.  Also the cvs repository can't be easily compressed, and since the
whole point of both David's and my solutions was to save space that
seemed like a backward step.  

> a rcsclean every few weeks to free up disk space, it gives you
> somewhat more than the solutions thus proposed, such as being able to
> capture the state every 5 minutes.

I do not know what cvs think of files being modified as you try to
commit them, but I suspect it would not be happy.  Yet that would happen
regularly if you commit every 5 minutes!

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