[olug] Archiving email.

[Jeff Hinrichs - DM&T]

On 2/12/07, Carl Lundstedt <clundst at unlserve.unl.edu> wrote:
> I have about 27,000 emails spanning 3-4 years of my life. I spent a
> couple hours Friday night pruning out span. I need to retain these for
> reference and I'm getting nervous housing them solely on the server.  If
> I lost some of these I know I'd be sorry.
>
> Anyone have suggestions on how to archive email in a good way?  I'd like
> to retain the ability to sort and search.  Could I create a thumbdrive
> of archived email to have with me?
>
> Somethings I"ve considered:
>
> a)Forward all of them to gmail.  Although I don't know if I trust those
> guys to be discrete
>
> b) pull them all of the server to a local machine, build a local mbox
> and ...  profit...
Depends on what you mean by search.  If you are happy with your
current search capabilities then why don't you just approach it as a
disaster recovery exercise.  Depending on their native format (mbox or
files) you could just compress them and then store a copy on a thumb
drive and a copy on a CD.  Figure out your loss threshold (1 hour, 1
day, 1 week, 1 month) and then just lather, rinse and repeat according
to that threshold.

-jeff
safe guarding and encryption is left as an exercise for the reader.