Retrieve lost messages in agent directory

[Harry Putnam <reader@newsguy.com>]

I don't think this is a problem that gnus is responsible for.  I think it
happened from repeatedly rsyncing the full gnus setup form laptop to
Main machine and vis-versa.

I may have blown it on the command line or not really understand how
rsync works.  Or may have even been some other cause.  To get to the
punch line:

I have 2900 messages in gnu.emacs.gnus.  Only 700+ are displayed in
summary buffer when entered with C-u <RET>.  I wonder if there is a
way to get those articles back into the nov files?  Seems like it
should be a function similar to nnml-generate-nov-data-bases since the
nov files under agent are wholly owned by gnus.

I couldn't really tell if `gnus-request-regenerate' would help.  An 's'
search in gnus-info gives no hits on it.  egrepping in *.el files I
found it but could'nt really tell what the heck it does.

Getting back to rsync for a moment:

I hope someone here is well experienced with rsyncing Gnus setup from
place to place.  My proceedure has been:

I work and live all week in one city then go home to another city on
weekends or days off etc.  When going home I rsync my gnus setup to my
laptop like this (from laptop):

rsync -avz -e ssh reader@<Main-Machine>:/home/reader/Mail/ Mail/
rsync  " ditto ditto                                /News/ News/

Then conclude with:
scp reader@<Main-Machine>:/home/reader/.newsr* .

That copies to and overwrites the current .newsrc .newsrc.eld on
portable machine

Reverse the process when coming back to main machine.

I suspect I may have left off a trailing slash sometime or something
else like that.

I've since written scripts to make it harder to screw it up, but just
wondered if other rsyncers would see a problem in the above proceedure.