Next: Web Searches, Up: Browsing the Web

#### 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.

It is also possible to archive individual `nnml`, `nnfolder`, or `nnmaildir` groups, while preserving marks. For `nnml` or `nnmaildir`, you copy all files in the group's directory. For `nnfolder` you need to copy both the base folder file itself (`FOO`, say), and the marks file (`FOO.mrk` in this example). Restoring the group is done with `G m` from the Group buffer. The last step makes Gnus notice the new directory. `nnmaildir` notices the new directory automatically, so `G m` is unnecessary in that case.