Hello Rolf, 

I take your point and as I said, that is what we are focussing on, and I already have and use Second Copy. I just wondered if, knowing that things like interference, wireless blips etc can cause crashes, I just wondered if there is a better way to do this. I can use the software I already have, with all the different copy options: Synchronise source and destination to match exactly; Exact Copy - copy source to destination, delete obsolete files from destination.

Ellie 

Hello All,

This is the setup I have at the moment:

I run Mercury from a central machine (used as a storage machine, not a workstation). The program is situated on the C drive on that computer. The mailboxes are on a raid system set up on the same computer (drive I) and the contents of these mailboxes are backed up regularly from the I drive to the C drive using Second Copy. The copy of Pegasus Mail program is set up on the same C drive as Mercury and is accessed by my husband on his computer and me on mine and both of us on our laptop wirelessly.

We have been experiencing problems from time to time on the network which has caused Pmail to crash and is a general nuisance including occasional need to restore heirarch.pm backups etc. We are trying to sort these out in other ways - got new router, trying to ensure that connections are clean etc. These problems would be much reduced if each computer ran a copy of Pegasus Mail program and accessed the mailbox on the computer, not using the network but that is not going to make use of Mercury (which we have got used to and really like) and would mean that we could not use the laptop to get our mail at night and when our computers are not turned on.

Is there some way using a backup program and a central backup area and some form of backup type that would mean that all the data would be transferred from a computer mailbox to a backup one and then back to another computer mailbox synchronising the data (on startup and shutdown of workstations and laptop, say)? We do that at the moment with our Palm calendars, but Mercury adds a complication to the mix. I am not a network person and have tried to wrap my head around this without getting anywhere.

Is there a better way? If someone has a suggestion, can you please explain in relatively simple terms, as my technical knowledge of Mercury is pretty limited.

Many thanks,

Ellie 

There are of course tools for synchronizing folders that you could use (like rsync, http://rsync.samba.org/), but that would probably be much more complicated than using Mercury. If the real problem is the stability of the local network you should focus on improving that.

/Rolf