Wasting time with old mail files
Category Technology
I admit that I am somewhat of a neurotic and have occasionally displayed some compulsive disorder symptoms. Today's frantic search for some old mail messages is perhaps a good example. I keep my old mail messages - I don't know why I started doing it - I really don't need them, but I keep them nonetheless.
I admit that I am somewhat of a neurotic and have occasionally displayed some compulsive disorder symptoms. Today's frantic search for some old mail messages is perhaps a good example. I keep my old mail messages - I don't know why I started doing it - I really don't need them, but I keep them nonetheless.
I don't just have a few archive databases, I have 41 databases in pretty much 6 month increments starting with my first production message on May 1, 1991 when I abandoned cc:Mail for Version 2 of Notes (The first message is from our Lotus Reps at the time, Ken Smart and Shelley Gibbons explaining why Lotus didn't recommend using USR modems for replication because even though they could achieve 14K in one direction in the HST mode, they would only work at 450 baud in the other direction - remember when dealing with modems was a major technical issue for everyone - how little I miss them!) Somewhere in a box I have another 6+ years of cc:mail messages all on 5 1/4" disks. (In the Notes 1 period, I still used cc:Mail for email, and never bothered to keep my V1 mail file - which had hundreds of messages with the subject line "test" as I drove everyone at Lotus, particularly John Vitolitch - who was the lead developer of the cc:Mail gateway which didn't work, nuts, while trying to live in both systems.) But, I digress. Occasionally, having old messages is a good thing, and I needed a message today from August of 2004. When I opened the database for that period, I found that almost 3 months of messages were missing. Further investigation showed that the "remove messages more than xxx days old" had been checked and by replicating it back and forth to my secondary server had effective eliminated the messages. When I switched from the old SBD and TS domains to the new YNYS domain last year, I created a new mail file since I been using the same replica for almost 15 years. Rather than archive the then current messages to a new copy, I just renamed the old mail file and forgot to check the space saver options which in this case was set to 400 days.
Most normal people would have chalked this up to stupidity and moved on, but I just couldn't do it. I've yet to have my 15 minutes of fame in life so I am looking to achieve it posthumously - some time in the future these mail files will be like one of the diaries that you see on PBS shows from the 1800s that historians consider a rare glimpse into the past. Certainly in the year 2121, some archeologist will find plenty of interesting stuff in the over 150,000 messages I have saved to date. Realizing that a 3 month gap would be a scientific loss, I began a frantic search of my servers and PCs. Rummaging around on my 6 servers, 2 laptops, 3 desktops, and an assortment of external devices, I found 12 copies of my mail file that had been copied for some reason to a drive or directory and been forgotten. The oldest dated back to 1997. There was one from when I was trying to figure out how to sell Zixit Mail for Notes to keep Jeff Papows happy when he was the Chairman of the Board of both IT Factory and Zixit that was totally unreadable. Several other copies had strange views and forms for projects or ideas that I no longer remember, but none had the messages from that time period. I was about ready to give up when I remembered that I had a pile of hard drives that had been pulled out of servers over the last couple of years that I saved (again for no good reason) and 3 hours later found a copy of my mail file on one of them. All is now right in my little world again.
I actually don't think the time was a waste as I spent some time reading through the archive mail files, remembering some old names, faces and battles. Best of all I discovering some old databases I had forgotten existed. I have a copy of the original partner forum from 1991, but I've lost the copy I had of the original NY Users Group database that was the precursor to all of the forum databases. I have a copy of the should be famous "Banter" database that I will blog about some day, as well as some old versions of databases that had to have a special view built to handle more than 7 levels or responses. Additionally, I found a couple of 15 year old feature/bug databases where I recorded problems with Notes that my users complained about (they are even mostly fixed). All in all, I'm impressed that databases from all the earlier versions are still completely compatible with version 7.01 - it seems the promise of everything working seamlessly in Hannover is quite believable.
Most normal people would have chalked this up to stupidity and moved on, but I just couldn't do it. I've yet to have my 15 minutes of fame in life so I am looking to achieve it posthumously - some time in the future these mail files will be like one of the diaries that you see on PBS shows from the 1800s that historians consider a rare glimpse into the past. Certainly in the year 2121, some archeologist will find plenty of interesting stuff in the over 150,000 messages I have saved to date. Realizing that a 3 month gap would be a scientific loss, I began a frantic search of my servers and PCs. Rummaging around on my 6 servers, 2 laptops, 3 desktops, and an assortment of external devices, I found 12 copies of my mail file that had been copied for some reason to a drive or directory and been forgotten. The oldest dated back to 1997. There was one from when I was trying to figure out how to sell Zixit Mail for Notes to keep Jeff Papows happy when he was the Chairman of the Board of both IT Factory and Zixit that was totally unreadable. Several other copies had strange views and forms for projects or ideas that I no longer remember, but none had the messages from that time period. I was about ready to give up when I remembered that I had a pile of hard drives that had been pulled out of servers over the last couple of years that I saved (again for no good reason) and 3 hours later found a copy of my mail file on one of them. All is now right in my little world again.
I actually don't think the time was a waste as I spent some time reading through the archive mail files, remembering some old names, faces and battles. Best of all I discovering some old databases I had forgotten existed. I have a copy of the original partner forum from 1991, but I've lost the copy I had of the original NY Users Group database that was the precursor to all of the forum databases. I have a copy of the should be famous "Banter" database that I will blog about some day, as well as some old versions of databases that had to have a special view built to handle more than 7 levels or responses. Additionally, I found a couple of 15 year old feature/bug databases where I recorded problems with Notes that my users complained about (they are even mostly fixed). All in all, I'm impressed that databases from all the earlier versions are still completely compatible with version 7.01 - it seems the promise of everything working seamlessly in Hannover is quite believable.