Re Portable. We now now how to move winpmail to a usb drive and operate it there and to move to other drives too.  I move it from my desktop computer to my laptop when I am on the road and back to the desktop when I get home. Thanks to those who helped us figure it out..  It loads and searches much faster on a ssd drive.

 Re Archive.

I keep backups of winpmail dated and delete old stuff and back up that version dated also then I can run the old version if I need to recover old emails from 1998.  Hope a better solution in V5.  It might be nice to have an archive folder that could be called in when needed but normally not loading the system.

I don't know if this has one but I can't find it. I see only a method of extracting emails to text files separately or in one file.

What I'd love to see is an archive feature that exports a set of emails or folders to a file and can be read back into Pegasus for reading in the normal way.

Currently my database contains all emails since I began using Pegasus. It's grown quite large as one can imagine. I've left them in because it's convenient to refer to emails or search for data or attachements. Using the current archival feature is not a good solution for attachements which might contain passwords or receipts and for text it isn't great either.

Pegasus has the tools necessary to search and get to data quickly I just wish I could archive in a form that can still allow Pegaus to work on them if needed.

There's probably more than one solution to this, but this is what I do:

1. Create a folder on a memory stick or attached drive.

2. Go to Folders / Add mailbox to list, and add this as a named directory.

3. Move (or copy) the messages to this new mailbox.

The messages will then be in the new directory as individual .cnm files - one per message.  The drive can be stored as backup or archive, and the messages can be searched and read as normal when that drive is attached and you have added the mailbox.

[quote user="PaulW"]

3. Move (or copy) the messages to this new mailbox.

[/quote]

Is there a way of preventing messages from being copied more than once so as not to create duplicates in the new mailbox? If I select all the messages in a folder and copy them to a 'twin' folder in the new mailbox and repeat this operation, say, a week later, I end up with the twin folder containing the messages in question twice. I'd rather receive a warning for those message to the effect of 'Message already exists. Would you like to overwrite it, overwrite all or skip all.' Perhaps I'm missing something, but now it seems that in order to prevent duplicates, I have to empty the twin folder first and then copy all the messages from the original folder to it.

Cheers!
Steffan

That method is too unreliable (perhaps with the advent of 4.51). I've tested this so many times and each time my archive can no longer be read ever.

See: http://community.pmail.com/forums/thread/19244.aspx

My last test is sitting in the folder I archived it to. Initially it read ok now I can no longer connect to it. The original files are as written because I zipped them as soon as they were made to make sure nothing changed them.

I can't therefore risk archiving and deleting messages from my main box only to find that I can never get Pegasus to look at the archives.

Also a big disadvantage seems to be that the folder you archive to must be the exact drive://path/folder it's restored to for it to work at all. This is a potential nightmare as drive letters are dynamic, computers change and one needs to remember those exact paths. Having said that the more serious issue is when the archive is no longer recognised even in the correct location.

I can't imagine using this method but if it works for others I'd love to know why mine doesn't other than this is failing on 4.51 

EDIT:

I've now found a way to connect to the archive which is reliable, albeit using a different method. The same archive that I can't connect to is still intact and readable using this method and the bonus is the Folder trays and structure are intact.

The way to do this is to connect as a different user. Use pconfig.exe

1) Restore your archive to a folder making sure read attributes are set on all files if it came from CD / DVD
2) Folder MUST be within PMAIL. eg. E:\Pmail\Archives. However, any folder drive is acceptable as long as it is within PMAIL
3) Run Pconfig and set the user to E:\Pmail\Archives and the newmail to E:\Pmail\~8
4) Run Pegasus and you will now see the archives intact

So far this appears to be 100% reliable 

 [quote user="Steffan"]Is there a way of preventing messages from being copied more than once so as not to create duplicates in the new mailbox?[/quote]

Not unless you choose to copy them by date or run a de-dup program of some sort.  This method applies to archiving or moving (usually) whole folders to a different medium.  If you want to do a straight back-up for data security, then there are better ways.

[quote user="louiscar"]That method is too unreliable (perhaps with the advent of 4.51). I've tested this so many times and each time my archive can no longer be read ever.[/quote]

I've never had a problem with this over many versions.  Are you remembering to disconnect the mailbox after use?

[quote]Also a big disadvantage seems to be that the folder you archive to must be the exact drive://path/folder it's restored to for it to work at all.[/quote]

The drive letters change all the time with my setup and I don't have any problem adding the mailbox again from any computer.

Perhaps if you give exact details of how to reproduce your error it may be clearer what is happening.

[quote user="PaulW"]

I've never had a problem with this over many versions.  Are you remembering to disconnect the mailbox after use?[/quote]

Yes I did disconnect. However, even if not it should not end up in a fatal problem.

[quote user="PaulW"] The drive letters change all the time with my setup and I don't have any problem adding the mailbox again from any computer.

Perhaps if you give exact details of how to reproduce your error it may be clearer what is happening.

[/quote]

Well I did so many things with slight differences but here's one typical instance:

1) Add mailbox to list and set a directory eg. E:\test

2) Create a folder in the new mailbox and copy a bunch of messages from one folder into it.

3) Disconnect from the mailbox

4) Reconnect -  ok. Disconnect again

One of my tests was to then move the folder from one place to another: So from E:\test I might make a folder on d:\test2 and copy the files into it.

5) Try to connect to d:\test2 - mailbox is empty.

6) go back and try to connect to e:\test - still ok.

7) Use  PMRestArch.exe  to copy from e:\test to d:\test2

8) connect to d:\test2 - still empty

9) connect to e:\test - now that's empty.

I've found without using  PMRestArch.exe  at all that I can't move the files anywhere else but where they were saved. The moment I do they no longer appear to contain anything. On some instances using  PMRestArch.exe actually worked but this seems intermittent and eventually doing a few more moves resulted in the same scenario.

It's unclear what triggerss the original file/location to fail but it seems to happen in the process of playing with  PMRestArch.exe  but I can't be absolutely sure. Most of my tests were similar to the above. But it soon became clear to me that I can't trust this method because for me I can recreate this problem every single time.

The same archive can be connected to as long as I put into a folder called pmail. This can be anywhere and I have to connect to it as a different user. In the above case the user would be test or test2. It's inconvenient but at least it shows there's nothing wrong with the archive itself, just the "add mailbox" archiving method.

The only thing I have not tried is to test this on a separate computer just in case I've got some kind of problem with any external dependant files if Pegasus uses them - which I have no idea.

I too have been using Peggy for business for ages. I used to back up on a floppy then a cd and then a dvd and now a dvd is too small.  It takes a long time to do a word search of all those 90,000 emails.  I keep pruning of course but Peggy gets bigger and bigger.  Yes it would be nice to have and archive folder that could be clicked in and out of the search.

I bring with me on usb drive now to my 3rd wold ventures but at a net cafe I have to load all of it on to the host machine which takes a long time and then i have to load the new version back onto the usb drive and then delete from the cafe machine. I have tried to run it off the usb drive but it wants a user name.  Do I have a user name?  I have been called a lot of things and entered the ones I can think of but none work~!!

Is Peggy portable?   I want a Portable Peggy~!!!  [:'(]

It's a while since I addressed this problem and came back to it because I need to get some archiving done.

I've now got to the bottom of the failures and understand the problems so for anyone else that might be interested I'm going to go into some detail about how to archive reliably so that your stored folders can be read within Pegasus.

My 'reliable' solution was a tad inconvenient and I didn't like the idea of going through this each time I wanted to access my archives.

The 'unreliable' method I originally posted was because of one thing: I created a folder in my new mailbox and that lead to the inability to read the mailbox. Here's the difference:

 When you create a new mailbox, a sub folder is automatically created 'new mail folder' which then archives all mail as if it were new mail. ie. each email is a separate .CNM File.

If you were to copy to this folder and archive then the process or reading in will work every time regardless of where that folder is stored.

However, If (like me) you made a folder to copy the emails to then what is created are two files. one PMM file and one PMI file. This will fail to read back in using add new mailbox method so don't do that.

Not a complete disaster though as all you need do is to copy those two files into your current user folder and it will appear under the folder name you created. It's important therefore you give the folder name a recognisable archive name. It will appear in your folders when you reopen Pegaus, so if's open, restart it .

There's one thing to note about using the first method. ie. archiving to the 'new mail folder'. When you connect to the mailbox it's is essential that you disconnect from the mailbox. If you forget to do this all those emails will go into your Users new mailbox and your archive will empty. As long as you remember this you can avoid the problem. 

 Hope this helps anyone make sense of the archiving. This may be worth a 'sticky' if enough people are interested in archiving.

 Edit: The only thing that worries me with either of these methods is if a future version of Pegasus changes so much that the pmm or cnm files are no longer compatible. Hopefully this will not happen but if it does I'd hope that a way of converting (without going back to an earlier version, loading all archives and then installing the new one) is given.