Re: backing up read messages, and subscribed lists.

["Steven E. Harris" <seh@panix.com>]

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