Manish Kathuria wrote:
In order to make the same set of emails accessible on both Windows
XP
Home and Fedora Core on my dual boot laptop, I have created a separate
FAT32 partition which I use just for storing the Thunderbird mail
files and directories. While working on Linux I mount this partition
through an appropriate entry in /etc/fstab and have configured the
Thunderbird profile in Linux in such a manner that it points to the
files and directories on this mounted FAT32 filesystem for accessing
mails for different accounts. I also make sure that I am using the
same version of Thunderbird on Windows and Linux.
Things had been working perfectly fine except for some small hitches
but recently after I compacted the mail folders and deleted trash
while working on Linux, the whole partition got corrupted and a number
of mails were lost. Though I was able to repair the FAT32 mail
partition and recover most of the files, its created some doubts in my
mind regarding this whole arrangement and robustness of FAT32
filesystem under Linux.
Ouch. This is one of the big problems with a traditional Unix mailbox:
when the mailbox gets large, programs have to do large amounts of
re-ordering and rewriting to delete e-mails, and there's a lot of scope
for things to go wrong.
But I'm still surprised that the FAT32 filesystem was the problem. I
can't recall an occasion when that gave any problems. Have you checked
smartctl -l error /dev/hda (assuming that it's an IDE disk)? Have you
checked memtest86? I *have* experienced problems with disk and memory...
One other thing -- the mailbox was well under 2GB large, wasn't it?
Have you considered a rsync arrangement to keep known-good copies of
your mailboxes? This would involve more diskspace, but would give you a
certain amount of backup.
(And please tell me you've re-examined your backup routines!)
James (using maildir).
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