Hi, I need some help. My old laptop stopped to work so I migrated everything to a new one. I use F39 on both. Yesterday I installed F39 on the new laptop, and rsync my /home/
from the backup to the new install.
When starting evolution it does not show any account , email or other data from my previous install. It even asks if I want to make it as a default mail reader.
I then click “do not change configuration” it shows evolution GUI and immediately appears the account creation wizard.
I am sure I have my 62GB of emails in my .local/share/evolution.
Alternatively and more error-prone, manually fiddle with the account IDs in Dconf/Gsettings and/or the folder paths and other settings (e.g. mail filter paths).
Hello Andre, many thanks, but unfortunately for me this option to use evolutions internal tool to backup and restore does not work. I have about 65 GB of data so manipulating
a single file of 65GB is not an option, especially because with rsync I can do incremental backups. It worked before when I switched from Slackware own build evolution to the fedora one in first time. Its this time it has not worked.
As far as I know and understand, having a full backup of my /home/folder should restore all the settings, I also backup the cache folders etc. So it should be basically a mirror of what I have in my /home folder. Strangely this round it has not worked only with evolution, firefox and other stuff all was restored like it was.
I will read more about how and where evolution stores stuff and try to understand it better.
But I think its only some kind of sqlite low level thing that has not been put up in the correct place probably.
In either case, if anybody else can help me would be great as this is my primary work email software for more than 20 years and now I am a bit stuck and have to use webmail
to answer my customers.
The backup file Andre mentions is about 230 kB tar-gzed.
It contains the conf-files etc for four of my mail accounts and I use IMAP. Only the configuration, no mails.
The backup file shouldn’t contain any actual mails, only where to re-download them from, on the new computer.
YMMV if you use POP, but then, does anybody nowadays?
I am sure I have my 62GB of emails in my .local/share/evolution
that’s where On This Computer/ data is stored.
Hmm, maybe I installed F38 instead of F39 ? I see my evolution version is 3.48.x if I am not mistaken on the old laptop I had evolution 3.50.x
Fedora 39 has Evolution 3.50.x. There’s something wrong with the setup.
By any chance, does ~/.var/app/org.gnome.Evolution/ exist and is of an expected size (several Giga bytes)? If so, then you had installed a Flatpak Evolution before.
Oh, maybe I know, you have installed Flatpak Evolution now, the one from Fedora Linux, which gnome-software offered you and you did not notice it. Uninstall it and install the RPM version.
Yes sir, I use POP. If the backup is only with accounts data then ok, but I will still need in some way to move my email somewhere to have another copy. So far the best solution for me seems to be rsync the whole home dir.
Hi Milan, I remember that evolution version was 3.50.x on my old laptop. And today I checked and on the new one now is also 3.50.x and emails appeard. So issue seems to be solved. Now I have another issue with the email viewer. It does not display the messages stating that Webkit is crashing.
For about the .var dir here it is:
du -hs /home/rc/.var/app/org.gnome.Evolution/
1,7M /home/rc/.var/app/org.gnome.Evolution/
I will see if maybe still have to be updated, seems that anaconda is slow to get on track.
Ok, for some reason I had 2 versions of evolution installed. One as flatpak another one as rpm. I dont know how this happened that I installed a flatpak, maybe because I didnt saw the icon on the dock and the dafault seems to be as flatpak.
So uninstallind the flatpak version seems it work as expected now.
Actually no, but it seems faster to me deal with POP, initially IMAP configuration if I recall well did not permit to keep the mails on the server, it got deleted them automatically. And for me is sometimes easier to directly access old emails on the server or at least search for them when I travel and have not access to my laptop. So I never got much experimentation with IMAP to be hoinest. Also I dont like the small lag to wait when I open an email and only headers are in your mail cliente. The message takes some time to get displayed, especially if it has attachments. But with POP it downloads the whole message immediately at startup. But this is just my personal prefference.
Actually no, but it seems faster to me deal with POP, initially IMAP
configuration if I recall well did not permit to keep the mails on
the server, it got deleted them
Most IMAP servers don’t do that unless you exceed a space quota (65GB
is a lot of mail for one user).
And for me is sometimes easier to directly access old emails on the
server or at least search for them when I travel and have not access
to my laptop.
That would only work as long as you manage your own server and can
connect to it from anywhere. The entire point of IMAP is to allow this
without you having to manage it.
So I never got much experimentation with IMAP to be hoinest. Also I
dont like the small lag to wait when I open an email and only headers
are in your mail cliente. The message takes some time to get
displayed, especially if it has attachments. But with POP it
downloads the whole message immediately at startup. But this is just
my personal prefference.
You can configure Evolution to download everything if you want, or even
download certain folders and not others. Not having to download
attachments unless you want to read them is an advantage for most
people.
There is literally nothing you can do with POP that you can’t also do
with IMAP, and save yourself having to migrate your mail as well.
That’s what I actually do, in case of network outage I still have access to the mails. Not that I can send anything if the network or mail servers are down, but I know the mail’s there.
