My backup situation is totally squared away now.. What my concern is in relation to what happened during my last Powermail upgrade... After doing the upgrade I couldn't read any of my email because my key was in an email somewhere.... Because I couldn't enter the key, I couldn't read my email... (the chicken-and-egg thing).. I now know that there is sort-of a solution to this because of the attachments folder (although, now I realize that even this is not going to be reliable because of the issue we are now discussing)...
The bottom line is, my email is vital - that's why I bought Powermail in the first place... If something goes bad with it again, I at least need to be able to get at my old email without jumping through a bunch of hoops.. In my current situation I can fire up any email client and redownload all of my email from the archive account and also have access to that repository remotely, which I often travel so it is very helpful... My solution works very well for me and leaves me a warm comfy feeling, except when Powermail isn't saving the attachments when a message is redirected..... It seems really odd to me that emails which are DELETED leave their attachments laying around (and using up my hard disk space! do you know how hard it is to track all this garbage down and manually delete it?) and messages which are redirected do not.... This is definitely frustrating because of the inconsistent logic which seems to be applied to how attachments are handled... All of that being said -- I did actually find a solution to this... It turns out that if you first MOVE the message into the folder and then redirect it that the attachment remains.... Of course, the message has a status of "redirected" so you need to set it back to "unread"... ... yet more attachment inconsistencies.... As long as I don't upgrade ever again I won't have to worry about this behavior changing, I guess.... - Greg >understandable if you do not want to wade 2x through spam. > >easiest solution then - make a backup every day and if you can a copy to >an external drive. then, like 1x a month, you just burn all important >data to a CDR. you anyhow should have means of backing up your computer, >you REALLY don't want to loose important stuff in that case that your >drive dies or something like that. rare, but it DOES happen. i make a >daily copy of my database (sheduled via ical and applescript) plus a >daily 'backup' copy to an external firewire drive (via synch!) and when >i'm not too lazy and find the time, i clean up my drive and burn stuff to >CDR (sooo cheap) or DVD (cheap now too) and have so my backups. if the >house burns down, oh well. but else, i don't worry too much (used to do >also weekly backup to tape, but became too clunky at this point for me, >so I dropped that). > >just trying to point out that some kind of backup, regularly, would >probably be the best - and then you do not need to go through any hoops >of changing filters. or forwarding etc etc... - also, make SURE you work >always on copies when you upgrade - ANY - software. it is also a good >idea to backup drives before upgrading operating system (my opinion and >experience). > >as frustrating the momentary situation right now seems to you, i am sure >that some improved environment can be created. > >---marlyse
