Re: PINE problem

Surely you have off system backup for all of this data of great concern?

If not it should be worth your while to simply purchase a USB external
hard drive and the use rsync to make a copy... In fact, with the current
cost of very large drives, you can also create a backup of your whole
80GB drive.

If your system doesn't include USB ports, a 2nd internal drive is a 
simple alternative.

What I do when I want to experiment is purchase a new hard drive of the
same or larger size (appropriate type of SATA or PATA, generally must 
match).  Then carefully make an image copy to the new drive, 
something like:
    dd bs=1M if=/dev/sda  of=/dev/sdb
                     ^^^          ^^^  might be hda and hdb, etc
then disconnect the original drive and, making jumper settings as
needed, connect the new drive as the only drive and boot the
system. It should come up exactly as before.. play with alpine
and verify that it works ... if it fails just swap back.

A. to avoid mail loss make sure your local postfix et al is not
   running or the system is not connected.
B. probably helpful if you download alpine before you make the copy
   so you don't have to connect to the network to acquire alpine.


On Wed, 3 Feb 2010, Bret Busby wrote:

> On 03/02/2010, Bret Busby <[email protected]> wrote:
> > On 03/02/2010, Matt Ackeret <[email protected]> wrote:
> >> On Tue, 2 Feb 2010, Bret Busby wrote:
> >>>On 03/02/2010, Matt Ackeret <[email protected]> wrote:
> >>>> On Tue, 2 Feb 2010, Bret Busby wrote:
> >>>>>To install and use alpine, to replace pine, the only way that I can
> >>>>>see of doing it, is buying a new computer, and building a new system,
> >>>>>with alpine instead of pine, then copying all of the mail folders and
> >>>>>the .pinerc file, to the new system, in addition to my web browsers'
> >>>>>data (bookmarks, etc), and, it would be such a waste, if the same
> >>>>>problem persists within alpine.
> >>>>
> >>>> This makes no sense.  Why can't you compile, or get someone else to
> >>>> compile,
> >>>> alpine to run on your existing computer?
> >>>>
> >>>
> >>>The way that I have described, ensures that what I have at present, is
> >>>not lost as with previous data, as I have described.
> >>>
> >>>It is parallel implementation, which is the only way to protect
> >>>existing data and the existing system.
> >>>
> >>>>From looking at the Debian package repository search facility, alpine
> >>>exists for Debian 5.0, that I am currently using, but, if I simply
> >>>install it over the pine that I am currently using, and things go
> >>>wrong, I stand to lose alot.
> >>
> >> So (1) back up your data, (2) install alpine, and if it for some
> >> reason doesn't work for you, use your backups.
> >
> > The thing is that, at present,
> > 1. I have reasonable confidence that, apart from not flushing the
> > messages from the INBOX as they are filtered, and thence downlloading
> > multiple copies of messages, pine seems to be kind of working, and
> > 2. I have an idea that the files that I need to backup, are the whole
> > of the mail directory (through all of its subdirectories, however many
> > gigabytes I previously specified, which would not fit on a single
> > DVD), and the .pinerc file, but I am not sure whether those are the
> > only files (and directory hierarchies) that I would need to backup,
> > and
> > 3. It was during a previous backup procedure, for a Debian system
> > upgrade (Iam not sure, but it may have been from 3.1 to 4), that I
> > lost 20 years of research.
> >
> > Thus, the parallel implementation method, appears to be the only
> > (relatively) safe option.
> >
> > Oh, a further note - It occurred to me last night, that this problem
> > occurred on the first day of this month, being the day that the
> > archiving of folders that are to be archived, occurs. I believe that
> > the folders that are supposed to be archived, were archived, but, I
> > cannot be sure that that process completed successfully.
> >
> > I assume that pine does not generate a log file of transactions,
> > and/or a log file of error messages, like fetchmail does.
> >
> > --
> >
> > Bret Busby
> > ................
> >
> 
> Oh, and, in checking, I do not have enough space on the hard drive on
> this system, to do the backup.
> 
> I have slightly less than a GB free, in the home partition, and, not
> enough elsewhere, for the mail directory hierarchy.
> 
> This computer is from the time when computers came standard with 80GB
> HDD capacity.
> 
> -- 
> 
> Bret Busby
> ................
> _______________________________________________
> Pine-info mailing list
> [email protected]
> http://mailman2.u.washington.edu/mailman/listinfo/pine-info
> 
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