Re: losing list of read messages

On Sun, Jun 26, 2005 at 04:57:10PM -0400, Jim Strathmeyer wrote:
> So I somehow lost the list of read messages in one of the newsgroups I
> read. I went there and all messages were marked as unread, when I had
> read every message for the past couple of months. It only happened to
> one newsgroup, and I can't figure out what happened. It's really
> annoying because I'll have to reread old messages to find older ones I
> haven't read. Any idea how I did this? It's fully possible I typed some
> weird key combination in tin, or even messed up a file in ~/.tin. I'd
> like to recover my list of read messages for this newsgroup, or at least
> be sure it won't happen again.

there are several ways how to lose the list of read messages:
- by pressing one of the following keys:
  SelectMarkGrpUnread 'z', SelectMarkGrpUnread2 'Z' or SelectResetNewsrc '^R'
- running multipe newsreaders or multipe instances of the same
  newsreader at once (the list of read articles is stored in your
  newsrc which might get corrupted if two processes trie to write to
  it at the same time).
- using the same newsrc for different newsservers (it very unlikely
  that two newsservers have the same article numbers).

p.s.: tin keeps a backup of the last newsrc, so if you recognize that
      something is going wrong you can reuse the old newsrc befor you
      startup tin again.

urs
-- 
"Only whimps use tape backup: _real_ men just upload their important stuff
 on ftp, and let the rest of the world mirror it ;)" - Linus