Re: Half starting the initial sync

On Mon, 23 Apr 2007, Cameron McCormack wrote:

> I’m about to use offlineimap to sync my maildir (which lives on a server
> somewhere) to my laptop.  I have a backup of the maildir from about 6
> months ago on my laptop already, and since the maildir is about 4GB, I’d
> like to start the synchronisation off with this 6 month old copy so that
> only the newer messages need to downloaded from the server.
>
> Is this possible?  If I just untar my backup into ~/.maildir, then run
> offlineimap for the first time, will it only download the newer
> messages.

Assuming that you weren't running offlineimap on the mailstore when it was 
backed up (and thus have no local state information), offlineimap will 
transfer all messages from the server to your laptop, and all messages 
from your laptop to your server.

Unless you know what you're doing, retrieving your current mailstore from 
your server is the safest option.

If bandwidth is really a concern, and you have access to the server, you 
could run offlineimap on the server, retrieving the mail store from the 
server's IMAP interface to a temporary directory, then transferring the 
state information and the list of email message files and checksums from 
the created maildir back to your laptop.  Rename the message files in your 
maildir backup as appropriate based on checksums (I'm partial to md5s 
myself), cross your fingers, and run offlineimap locally.

> Is there a way I can get it to show me what things are going
> to be downloaded without actually doing it?