Yearly Email Archiving

This time it took me a while longer, because I was busy with \$reallife during the regular Winter Solstice celebrations, but earlier tonight I finished my traditional “end of the year” email archiving process. Messages that I posted in 2008, ‘cached’ copies of the replies I received, and any incoming message that listed one of my addresses in the recipient list have been moved to “mail.archive-2008“.

These messages were stashed safely away, and then deleted from my laptop’s disk. I don’t often need more than a year’s email backlog, and when I do backups are always available somewhere around.

When the archiving process was finished I ran my rdiff-backup script once more, and the shuffling of email seems to have generated an rdiff-backup increment of 946 KB:

    $ rdiff-backup --list-increment-sizes /archive/keramida/mailnews
    Time                       Size        Cumulative size
    -----------------------------------------------------------------------------
    Sat Jan 17 00:53:28 2009         1.85 GB           1.85 GB   (current mirror)
    Fri Jan 16 18:22:24 2009          946 KB           1.85 GB   (2008 archive mirror)
    ...

I am beginning to like rdiff-backup. A lot :-)