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#### 6.5.1 Archiving Mail

Some of the back ends, notably `nnml`, `nnfolder`, and `nnmaildir`, now actually store the article marks with each group. For these servers, archiving and restoring a group while preserving marks is fairly simple.

(Preserving the group level and group parameters as well still requires ritual dancing and sacrifices to the `.newsrc.eld` deity though.)

To archive an entire `nnml`, `nnfolder`, or `nnmaildir` server, take a recursive copy of the server directory. There is no need to shut down Gnus, so archiving may be invoked by `cron` or similar. You restore the data by restoring the directory tree, and adding a server definition pointing to that directory in Gnus. The Article Backlog, Asynchronous Fetching and other things might interfere with overwriting data, so you may want to shut down Gnus before you restore the data.