backing up read messages, and subscribed lists.

backing up read messages, and subscribed lists.

[J. David Boyd]

I'm trying to find the correct files to backup to my home machine so that I
can continue to read where I was at work.

I've tried copying the News directory, as well as .newsrc and .newsrc.eld.
But it seems that something is still missing.

Any information on where else I need to gather files to make certain that when
I get home I can continue where I was from work?

Dave 

Re: backing up read messages, and subscribed lists.

[Ted Zlatanov]

On Wed, 13 Jul 2005, david@adboyd.com wrote:

> I'm trying to find the correct files to backup to my home machine so
> that I can continue to read where I was at work.
> 
> I've tried copying the News directory, as well as .newsrc and
> .newsrc.eld.  But it seems that something is still missing.
> 
> Any information on where else I need to gather files to make certain
> that when I get home I can continue where I was from work?

You should really consider an IMAP server, which you can access from
anywhere.  The process you describe is painful, and will not work well
(e.g. what if you forget to synchronize one day, now you have two
branches of your data).

In addition, you can use an IMAP server from any IMAP-capable client,
so if Gnus is not available you can fire up Mozilla Mail, Thunderbird,
or any of the many IMAP clients out there.

Ted

Re: backing up read messages, and subscribed lists.

[J. David Boyd]

"Ted Zlatanov" <tzz@lifelogs.com> writes:

> On Wed, 13 Jul 2005, david@adboyd.com wrote:
>
>> I'm trying to find the correct files to backup to my home machine so
>> that I can continue to read where I was at work.
>> 
>> I've tried copying the News directory, as well as .newsrc and
>> .newsrc.eld.  But it seems that something is still missing.
>> 
>> Any information on where else I need to gather files to make certain
>> that when I get home I can continue where I was from work?
>
> You should really consider an IMAP server, which you can access from
> anywhere.  The process you describe is painful, and will not work well
> (e.g. what if you forget to synchronize one day, now you have two
> branches of your data).
>
> In addition, you can use an IMAP server from any IMAP-capable client,
> so if Gnus is not available you can fire up Mozilla Mail, Thunderbird,
> or any of the many IMAP clients out there.

But I'm not talking about my email at all, just news groups.  I don't control
them, so I don't think IMAP would help in this situation.

I just want to save my gnus pointers to where and what I've read, so I don't
have to read the same things twice.

Thanks,

Dave in Largo, FL

Re: backing up read messages, and subscribed lists.

[Ted Zlatanov]

On Fri, 15 Jul 2005, david@adboyd.com wrote:

> But I'm not talking about my email at all, just news groups.  I
> don't control them, so I don't think IMAP would help in this
> situation.

No, you're right.  Your original message said "backing up read
messages, and subscribed lists" so I assumed you meant e-mail.

> I just want to save my gnus pointers to where and what I've read, so
> I don't have to read the same things twice.

(note I'm not an expert in this, so excuse any inaccuracies)

It should be enough to copy newsrc.eld, it has all the marks and
read/unread information I believe.  The problem is that it has all the
other data you may not want to copy as well: gnus-server-alist,
gnus-killed-list, gnus-topic-topology, gnus-topic-alist,
gnus-format-specs, etc.  So unless your home setup is exactly like
your work setup, it will probably not work.  What may work is to
extract the line(s) for the group(s) of interest and copy those over,
but the server names and group names have to match.

If anyone else knows how to do this, please speak up...

Ted

Re: backing up read messages, and subscribed lists.

[J. David Boyd]

"Ted Zlatanov" <tzz@lifelogs.com> writes:

> It should be enough to copy newsrc.eld, it has all the marks and
> read/unread information I believe.  The problem is that it has all the
> other data you may not want to copy as well: gnus-server-alist,
> gnus-killed-list, gnus-topic-topology, gnus-topic-alist,
> gnus-format-specs, etc.  So unless your home setup is exactly like
> your work setup, it will probably not work.  What may work is to
> extract the line(s) for the group(s) of interest and copy those over,
> but the server names and group names have to match.

Well, my at home setup and at work setup are identical, as they are both based
on Cygwin, and running under Windows XP, using the latest cvs version of
emacs, and the gnus that comes with it. So, I do want all the info that
newsrc.eld contains.

It's no problem at all to set up a script that sends over my newsrc.eld right
at the end of the work day, and retrieves it from home at the beginning of the
work day.

Thanks for the info, and the effort!

Dave

Re: backing up read messages, and subscribed lists.

[Steven E. Harris]

david@adboyd.com (J. David Boyd) writes:

> It's no problem at all to set up a script that sends over my
> newsrc.eld right at the end of the work day, and retrieves it from
> home at the beginning of the work day.

But that's not enough, and won't work properly if you use the agent
for your IMAP groups. We've been over this a few times over the last
couple of years.

At present I use unison (rsync works fine too) to synchronize
everything under ~/doc/news, excluding ~/doc/news/agent. I used to
synchronize ~/.newsrc and ~/.newsrc.eld, but was advised against
it. Supposedly the per-backend marks files take care of whatever state
is represented in .newsrc.eld.

However, you'll find that your IMAP groups don't behave properly after
this kind of syncing. New messages appear as expected, but Gnus loses
track of which read messages are on the server and which ones are
marked for expiry.

For example, if at work you received and read three new messages, then
go home and synchronize your Gnus files, you'll find that Gnus at home
won't realize that those three messages you read at work are present
on the server. You can kick it into doing so by manually running
`gnus-agent-expire-group', but this also has the unfortunate
side-effect of losing your expiry marks previously set at home.¹

Note that I'm not syncing the agent files. My take on it is that the
agent is good for local caching; I don't want to synchronize the
cached copies of messages I've read in one location to another. But
cached articles aside, apparently some extra files conveying some
agent-related state must be necessary to prevent the lossy behavior
I'm describing.


Footnotes: 
¹ Note that this is still the case even with an IMAP server that
  supports user-defined flags such as "gnus-expire" and
  "gnus-dormant".

-- 
Steven E. Harris

Re: backing up read messages, and subscribed lists.

[J. David Boyd]

"Steven E. Harris" <seh@panix.com> writes:

> david@adboyd.com (J. David Boyd) writes:
>
>> It's no problem at all to set up a script that sends over my
>> newsrc.eld right at the end of the work day, and retrieves it from
>> home at the beginning of the work day.
>
> But that's not enough, and won't work properly if you use the agent
> for your IMAP groups. We've been over this a few times over the last
> couple of years.
>
> At present I use unison (rsync works fine too) to synchronize
> everything under ~/doc/news, excluding ~/doc/news/agent. I used to
> synchronize ~/.newsrc and ~/.newsrc.eld, but was advised against
> it. Supposedly the per-backend marks files take care of whatever state
> is represented in .newsrc.eld.
>
> However, you'll find that your IMAP groups don't behave properly after
> this kind of syncing. New messages appear as expected, but Gnus loses
> track of which read messages are on the server and which ones are
> marked for expiry.
>
> For example, if at work you received and read three new messages, then
> go home and synchronize your Gnus files, you'll find that Gnus at home
> won't realize that those three messages you read at work are present
> on the server. You can kick it into doing so by manually running
> `gnus-agent-expire-group', but this also has the unfortunate
> side-effect of losing your expiry marks previously set at home.¹
>
> Note that I'm not syncing the agent files. My take on it is that the
> agent is good for local caching; I don't want to synchronize the
> cached copies of messages I've read in one location to another. But
> cached articles aside, apparently some extra files conveying some
> agent-related state must be necessary to prevent the lossy behavior
> I'm describing.
>
>
> Footnotes: 
> ¹ Note that this is still the case even with an IMAP server that
>   supports user-defined flags such as "gnus-expire" and
>   "gnus-dormant".
>


Thanks for the caveat.

I'm not using IMAP for mail with Gnus, just reading newsgroups, so I'm going
to try and synch up the .newrc, .newsrc.eld, and files in ~/News, and see how
it goes.

Thanks for the lucid explanation!

Dave

Re: backing up read messages, and subscribed lists.

[Ted Zlatanov]

On Fri, 15 Jul 2005, seh@panix.com wrote:

> At present I use unison (rsync works fine too) to synchronize
> everything under ~/doc/news, excluding ~/doc/news/agent. I used to
> synchronize ~/.newsrc and ~/.newsrc.eld, but was advised against
> it. Supposedly the per-backend marks files take care of whatever state
> is represented in .newsrc.eld.

That's strange, I didn't know marks were in the file system.  At least
for me, under ~/News/marks there are a lot of .marks files.  How does
that coordinate with newsrc.eld?  Why have marks in the newsrc.eld
file at all if they are in .marks files as well?

Thanks
Ted