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NewsDir seriously clobbered

From:Richard Porter Date:28 Mar 2017 18:25
Replies: Re: NewsDir seriously clobbered ("David J. Ruck")

I had a system crash that was initiated by NetSurf but it brought down 
Messenger Pro, or at least severely clobbered !NewsDir. When I 
rebooted MPro did an awful lot of disc I/O but I couldn't tell what it 
was up to.

All my mail groups had disappeared and only the newsgroups remained. I 
checked the Groups file which contained only the newsgroups. Groups~ 
was the same. A lot of spool directories were missing their Group 
files.

Unfortunately although MPro saves the previous version of some files 
by the time you realise you need them they've been overwritten!

I tried recovering !NewsDir from the latest !SafeStore backup but that 
was in a much worse state - just about everything in the wrong place - 
so I resorted to repairing the version I had.

To make matters worse, when I went for a cuppa SafeStore decided it 
was time to start backing up !NewsDir. That was quickly stopped and 
fortunately I had already copied it back to my hard drive.

I restored the Groups file from the backup but it was still out of 
kilter with the spool files. In particular my main groups (incoming, 
deferred, sent, wastebasket) had been replaced by c.s.a. newsgroups.

!GroupChck came to the rescue. Fortunately the main groups had been 
moved elsewhere so I was able to get everything back to where it 
should have been.

I could now see all my mail and news, or at least what had been 
previously downloaded, but there were still some problems:

1. Incoming mail was not being debatched;
2. I had a very old set of signatures including one for ZFC!
3. spell checking was mysteriously enabled;
4. a white on grey instruction to "Type message above the line, and 
signature below" appears following the signature delimiter when I open 
a new Edit mail window.

1 was traced back to the Config file where DefaultUser was undefined. 
This could have occurred because the main groups went AWOL.

2 was rectified from another backup.

The other two don't really matter but I can't find any way to turn 
them off. There's no obvious parameter in Config or in the MPro 
choices file or in the Message editing choices. So where are these 
settings defined and how did they get changed?

Presumably after I rebooted MPro tried to recover itself having only 
the newsgroups. It was fortuitous or more likely well planned that it 
didn't simply overwrite spool directories but moved them elsewhere.

All I can say after that experience was at least it's RISC OS and can 
see what's going on. Had it been on Windows or macOS I wouldn't even 
know where to start. On the other hand the browser would be less 
likely to fall over in the first place!

-- 
Richard Porter                      http://www.minijem.plus.com/
t: @westernexplorer                 mailto:ricp@...
I don't want a "user experience" - I just want stuff that works.

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