Re: backup and synchronize to fastmail

[Alejandro Jakubi <jakubi@xxxxxxxxx>]

On Thu, 15 May 2008, John Goerzen wrote:

> Frankly, I am not sure what purpose a log would serve.

First of all, I have missed that in the manual there is a command line option

===
-l filename
Enables logging to filename. This will log everything that goes to the screen
to the specified file.

===

As it prints very similar, I have confused it with the option -1. By the way,
I do not see it in the version of offlineimap installed in the departmental
cluster:

$ offlineimap -h

        offlineimap [ -1 ] [ -P profiledir ] [ -a accountlist ]  [
        -c configfile  ] [ -d debugtype[,debugtype...]  ] [ -o ] [
        -u interface ]


As I have not seen how the offlineimap logging is like, I am assuming here
that it is composed of lines of the form:

time    sync operation

where "sync operation" may be something like: 3 folders syncronized, or
folders a, b and c syncronized.

So, in the first stage of backup to my fastmail account, I would expect to see
in the logfile that offlineimap works here, it copies the folders that has to
copy and nothing strange happens.

Then, when a "steady" regime is reached, I expect to watch a typical pattern
of logged sync operations both in time and amount of folders. And any
significant departure from this pattern could be taken as a signal of
potential problems. Eg, if the cluster rebooted and the offlineimap background
process died, the absence of recent sync operations could warn me about this
problem so that I would go to start offlineimap again.

Basically, this is like my current usage of the imapfilter logfile. I watch its
tail once a day or so. May be that with the usage of offlineimap I will realize 
of
some additional information that could be extracted from its logfile.

Regards, Alejandro Jakubi