Re: backing up read messages, and subscribed lists.

[david@adboyd.com (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