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Forum Discussion
Keep an active Mac Mail mailbox on Dropbox
Hi, my email archive has grown over the years – I want to keep all the important old stuff (since 1994) because it's kind of my personal archive. Now my mail provider (a little independent company) is complaining about the 50GB+ that I am using and wants to start charging me for that. There's plenty of space in my Dropbox so it would be great to be able to move old mail folders to Dropbox while still being able to access them from all my devices. In a nutshell, this is what I'd like to do:
- Make the mailbox folders local on one of my computers so they don't take up space on my IMAP mail server
- Move the local mbox folders to Dropbox while still being able to access them through the Mail.app
- Then add them as local folders on other devices so they are available everywhere.
Is this even possible, or do I risk messing up all my data?
Thanks
Christoph
ceedee wrote:
Is this even possible, or do I risk messing up all my data?
Dont do it. The data will get corrupt.
Dropbox (and any other cloud tool basically) isn't designed to use data files when something else is, so, as Mail has things being written and read from almost constantly it will cause issues.
The other thing is that huge file will take, possibly, a long time to upload and download everytime its used. If you accidentally forget to allow them to fully sync before opening on another device you'll get a conflicted copy and end up with 2 different sets of data files - and no way to merge back together.
- Mark
Super User II
ceedee wrote:
Is this even possible, or do I risk messing up all my data?
Dont do it. The data will get corrupt.
Dropbox (and any other cloud tool basically) isn't designed to use data files when something else is, so, as Mail has things being written and read from almost constantly it will cause issues.
The other thing is that huge file will take, possibly, a long time to upload and download everytime its used. If you accidentally forget to allow them to fully sync before opening on another device you'll get a conflicted copy and end up with 2 different sets of data files - and no way to merge back together.
