Some tips for Ximian Evolution, a mail program.
The following is from the evolution@lists.ximian.com list.
Note that the step about copying/backing-up ~/.gconf/apps/evolution is also necessary. You can combine it all into one step
evolution --force-shutdown
cd ~
find evolution -name "mbox.*" -exec rm -f '{}' ';'
tar -cvzf /path/to/evolution.tar.gz evolution .gconf/apps/evolution
(replacing "/path/to/" with the actual directory/mountpoint where you want the backup). The find line is optional. Without it you will backup all index files etc., evolution will create these if missing.
To restore, do this
evolution --force-shutdown cd ~ tar -xvzf /path/to/evolution.tar.gz
that will overwrite your current files with the old ones. If you want to move the old ones first, rather than overwrite them, do this
evolution --force-shutdown cd ~ mv evolution evolution.old mv .gconf/apps/evolution evolution.gconf.old tar -xvzf /path/to/evolution.tar.gz
The following is from the evolution@lists.ximian.com list.
To back up to a CD-R(W), do this. First, as root, do
cdrecord -scanbus
and make a note of the device number (it has the form x,y,z) of the CD burner you want to use that is reported by the above command. In what follows, replace x,y,z with the actual number you need (it's likely to be something like 1,0,0 or 0,0,0). Then do
cd ~ evolution --force-shutdown tar -cjvf evolution.tar.bz2 ~/evolution ~/.gconf/apps/evolution mkisofs -o evolution.iso -J -R -V "Evolution Backup" evolution.tar.bz2 cdrecord -v dev=x,y,z evolution.iso
When it is all finished you can double check that your CD backup is good by mounting the CD and doing the following
md5sum evolution.tar.bz2 /mountpoint/of/cd/evolution.tar.bz2
and making sure that the same number is returned for both files.
Once you know that your CD is good you can remove the backup files from your system by doing
rm ~/evolution.tar.bz2 ~/evolution.iso
To restore your backup just mount your CD and do
cd ~ evolution --force-shutdown tar -xjvf /mountpoint/of/cd/evolution.tar.bz2