[Pan-users] Re: Best way to move Pan?

[Duncan]

beartooth posted <address@hidden>, excerpted
below,  on Fri, 11 Feb 2005 13:14:22 -0500:

> I want to move to a different machine. I tried copying all of .pan from
> my home directory, but it was too big even for a CD. So I managed to get
> all except the very large files onto a floppy, and copied that; it seems
> to work. But I'm thinking there may well be a better way ...

There are several different ways depending on what you want exact things
you want to save.

* If you want to save everything, including PAN's cache of all the files
it has downloaded, move the entire .pan dir, as you attempted to do.
However, this can be quite wasteful since a lot of that cached will
presumably either never be used again or still be on the server if needed
again, once you move to the new machine.  Depending on how large you have
PAN's cache configured, it can be multiple gigs of info, so this is a
pretty wasteful way of moving things, if you are a bit restricted on space
for your transfer medium.

* Easy ways of pruning the above down would be telling PAN to delete its
cache, deleting it manually, or simply not copying the
.pan/data/messages/cache dir along with the rest.

* If all you want to save is the tracking data, which groups you are
subscribed to and which articles you've marked read or not, etc, you can
use PAN's export to .newsrc format file feature, then import it on the new
one.  Each configured server would use its own .newsrc file (I think, I've
never used the feature), and exactly which file to use is configured under
the server properties.  Note that it doesn't say import/export, just has a
checkbox to use or not, so you'd mark use, then close PAN so it created
the file, and on the other end, open PAN, set up a server, and tell it to
use the transported file.  (Again, having not used the feature, I'm not
exactly sure how it works.  Therefore, I'd use a /copy/ of the file
the first time to be sure, open pan and tell it where to look, shut
down and move the /copy/ in place, and open pan again.  This to prevent
pan's zeroing out the file when you initially tell it where to look,
overwriting the data there with new null data because it doesn't have
anything for the server yet when you first tell it where to look.)

* You may also save individual files under .pan/data that correspond to
individual features, the config.xml file for general pan config, filters,
rules, scoring, profiles, and accels files for each of those features
depending on how customized you've made PAN, the various server_sub.idx
and .dat files for your subscribed groups, server_unsub.dat files for
the big list of all available groups, the threads file if you have watched
or ignored threads, the folders files if you have stuff there the status
of which you want to save (note that this does /not/ save the actual
messages), etc.  The server subdirs save the current overviews for each
group, but /not/ the messages themselves.  The actual messages are stored
in the messages subdir, which in turn has subdirs for cache, which you'll
probably /not/ want to transfer over and which will be the most bulky
unless you've told PAN to delete the cache as above, and folders, which
you likely WILL want to transfer, even if you've not saved anything
specifically to folders, because the messages you've sent are stored there
-- unless you don't care if you lose that record, in which case you can
probably ignore (not copy) the entire messages subdir, both cache and
folders.

So... most folks will want to copy the entire .pan dir, except for
.pan/data/messages/cache.  If that's still too big, it's likely the
messages/folders subdir, particularly if you post a lot or save lots of
messages to folders.  From within PAN, try deleting your oldest posted
messages from pan.sent, keeping only a week's or a month's worth, and
making alternative arrangements for anything you've saved to folders.  If
that's still too large, save your group tracking info off to .newrc
format, and delete those subdirs.  What you have left should be reasonably
sized, and contain everything else PAN stores between sessions (assuming
you have your score file located in the same place, noting that it's
specifically configurable so you can share the same score file between PAN
and other news applications, the other reason PAN works with .newsrc
format files as well and allows you to specify where they are too).

-- 
Duncan - List replies preferred.   No HTML msgs.
"Every nonfree program has a lord, a master --
and if you use the program, he is your master."  Richard Stallman in
http://www.linuxdevcenter.com/pub/a/linux/2004/12/22/rms_interview.html