[Mailman-Users] How safely to truncate the mbox file?

[Jon Carnes]

Sounds like you have the right idea about archives...

The mbox is used to regenerate the web-based archive lists. During
normal use only a certain segment of the archives are rebuilt - like a
months worth or a weeks worth(it depends on your list settings and how
it is set to display the archives).

If you have your archives segmented weekly, then moving the mbox at
midnight on Sunday would do the trick (as long as nothing else had the
file open...).

Do save the mbox files though, you may need to cat them all together and
rebuild those archives at some future date.

Good Luck - Jon Carnes

BTW: you should create a test list and play with that one before doing
this to any of your production lists.


On Fri, 2003-04-25 at 14:42, Adam Curtin wrote:
> My arhives/private/list.mbox/list.mbox is 14 months old, and 200Mb. It's a
> pain it being so large, because it changes every day so my nightly backups
> write 199Mb of unchanged data to tape every morning.
> 
> I've looked in the FAQ and documentation, and apart from editing the file
> to remove unwanted messages, I can't see an explanation of truncating the
> file without harming future archives. I'd like to:
> 
>   $ mv list.mbox list.mbox.sv && touch list.mbox
>   $ gzip -9 list.mbox.sv
> 
> ... or equivalent, through an entry in logrotate.d
> 
> Will this be OK? Will existing archives remain untouched, and future ones
> be safe? The list starts new archives weekly - is there an ideal moment to
> do this truncation, e.g. 00:00 Monday?
> 
> 
> On a related note, I'd like to remove the offering to download the gzip'd
> mbox - how do I do that?
> 
> Thanks in advance,
> A.
> 
> 
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