Go to the first, previous, next, last section, table of contents.


6.4.1 Archiving Mail

Some of the back ends, notably nnml and nnfolder, now actually store the article marks with each group. For these servers, archiving and restoring a group while preserving marks is fairly simple.

(Preserving the group level and group parameters as well still requires ritual dancing and sacrifices to the .newsrc.eld deity though.)

To archive an entire nnml or nnfolder server, take a recursive copy of the server directory. There is no need to shut down Gnus, so archiving may be invoked by cron or similar. You restore the data by restoring the directory tree, and adding a server definition pointing to that directory in Gnus. The section 3.14 Article Backlog, section 3.11 Asynchronous Article Fetching and other things might interfer with overwriting data, so you may want to shut down Gnus before you restore the data.

It is also possible to archive individual nnml or nnfolder groups, while preserving marks. For nnml, you copy all files in the group's directory. For nnfolder you need to copy both the base folder file itself (FOO, say), and the marks file (FOO.mrk in this example). Restoring the group is done with G m from the Group buffer. The last step makes Gnus notice the new directory.


Go to the first, previous, next, last section, table of contents.