If you use FC5 or 6 and use Evolution as your email client of choice, here’s the best way that I have found to back up your mail to restore it to a new Evolution.
Evolution stores your data in $HOME/.evolution, your account settings in $HOME/.gconf/apps/evolution and your passwords in $HOME/.gnome2_private/Evolution.
SSL Certificates are stored in $HOME/.camel_certs.
First of all, shut Evolution and its background processes (Evolution Data Server, Evolution Alarm Notify) completly down by using evolution --force-shutdown.
Then copy the contents of $HOME/.evolution/, $HOME/.gnome2_private/Evolution, $HOME/.camel_certs.
Then dump your Evolution settings stored in GConf by running gconftool-2 --dump /apps/evolution > some-file.xml where “some-file.xml” is the name of the file the information is written to.
On the new partition, make sure you are not running GConf (by “ps ax | grep gconf” for example; you normally have to leave Gnome for that and then run “gconftool-2 –shutdown” on the shell).
Then import those settings by running gconftool-2 --load some-file.xml and log in to Gnome again, also copy the three folders
($HOME/.evolution/, $HOME/.gnome2_private/Evolution, $HOME/.camel_certs).
All I have to say is that you ROCK!!!
thank you so much for this….
i’m new to Linux environment and this helped me alot.
i’m just hoping that This works with Fedora core 4 as well. I’m just gonna give it a try….