[conspire] how do I move my .mozilla directory and all the mailcontents to an external drive

[David Fox]

On Sat, Apr 19, 2008 at 10:30 PM,  <freepalestin at dslextreme.com> wrote:
>  The symlink is not working.
>  I did the following
>  mv .mozilla /new/path
>  cd ~
>  ln -s /new/path/.mozilla ./

Obviously, I did the testing outside my $HOME, but does this resemble
your .mozilla directory?

dfox at m206-157:/tmp$ ls -l .mozilla
lrwxrwxrwx 1 dfox dfox 17 2008-04-18 18:38 .mozilla -> /storage/.mozilla

I just did that above with my pictures directory (pics) putting them
in my bigger volume (/storage) and doing a symlink like that (ln -sf
/storage/pics . when I was in my $HOME) and it works, as far as being
able to cd into pics and see all the pictures, which are now in
/storage/pics.

And 'pics' is just now a symlink, before it was a directory tree:

dfox at m206-157:~$ ls -l pics
lrwxrwxrwx 1 dfox dfox 13 2008-04-20 10:08 pics -> /storage/pics


And digikam can still find my albums, which is a good sign. :)

>  Then I tried creating a .mozilla directory in my home directory and
>  copying some of the files to the .mozilla in my home directory from the
>  /new/path/.mozilla that I thought might be needed e.g. prefs.js,

Best thing to do is copy everything underneath .mozilla. Or do the mv
.mozilla /new/path bit, which moves all stuff underneath the .mozilla
directory to the new location.

>  msgFilterRules.dat. Then I tried symlinks to the files in the Mail
>  directory. That didn't work either. Maybe I need to understand what is in
>  the .msf files and do something with them.

I don't know seamonkey, but if it stores the mail you've downloaded
inside the .mozilla directory, you should be OK. Mail might also be
stored in .Mail underneath your home directory. In that case, you'll
need to mv .Mail as well and create the symlink if  you want your mail
on your bigger drive.

>  Right now I am not downloading mail to my computer. I'm accessing my mail
>  from dslextreme.

Were you downloading mail before - using fetchmail or using
postfix/exim as a mail exchanger? When I had the tsoft.com account, I
just ran postfix and got all my mail delivered automatically. Stuff
went into .Mail when I ran my mail reader (typically sylpheed). For
now, I've been reading gmail within iceweasel, so the mail stays over
there. (tsoft == Raw Bandwidth, of course).


>  Seamonkey seems to want to have the .mozilla directory and all the files
>  under it in the home directory. There is probably something I'm not
>  understanding - I obviously have not figured it out yet.

If seamonkey does things right, it'll just follow the .mozilla link to
the files that are elsewhere, and everything should still work. And
other browsers might have files inside .mozilla as well -
firefox/iceweasel does, for instance.

>  I sure want to have access to all of my email that I had previously
>  downloaded. I also want to have my email downloaded onto my external

Depends where it's stored. If underneath .mozilla then that should have worked.

>  Darlene Wallach