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From: Steinar Bang <sb@metis.no>
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Subject: a big .newsrc.eld is *fragile*
Date: 16 Feb 1999 15:00:14 +0100
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This point comes up from time to time: a big .newsrc.eld holding a lot 
of the status information of Gnus is *fragile*.

It's fragile because we risk losing a *lot* of _mostly_ _static_
information, if the .newsrc.eld is corrupted 

Right now I had XEmacs crash under me (probably because I exhausted
the virtual memory) and this caused me to have a .newsrc.eld file of
size 0 bytes.

Luckily I have a crontab job copying this file to a machine that takes 
real backups.  Less luckily this crontab job hasn't been running since 
I updated my system from RedHat 5.0 to S.u.S.E. 5.3 on january 8...:-( 

One thing is the tickmarks that has disappeared.  Far worse is the
group information that may have gone away.