Moving the Icedove profile from the /home partition to the Data partition

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amenex
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Joined: 01/03/2015

After some housekeeping involving the copying and pasting of my Icedove profile
from one installation of Trisquel_9 to another, I came upon a situation in which
the home folder could not be used because of lack of space on that partition.
Consequently I copied the Icedove profile from one HDD to a new folder in the
target Data partition of the target Trisquel_9 installation.
I also copied the profiles.ini file into the same folder:
(1) Trisquel_9 Home folder is in /dev/sda1and holds only profiles.ini
(2) Data partition is /dev/sda5 and holds both ~20GB.profile and profiles.ini
I made sure that profiles.ini has the path to the new location of ~20GB.profile
in both places.
On startup of Icedove the Profiles Manager is presented, but the system cannot
find its way to ~20GB.profile even though that's the only profile name presented
in the Profile Manager's popup window.
Here's a copy of that profiles.ini file:
[Install...redacted...]
Default=media/george/b...redacted...3/george/.icedove/~20GB.profile
Locked=1

[Profile0]
Name=~20GB.profile
IsRelative=1
Path=media/george/b...redacted...3/george/.icedove/~20GB.profile
Default=1

[General]
StartWithLastProfile=0
Version=2

The only syntax that seems out of place is that the system drops the slash "/"
from the beginning of the PATH statement when I try to save the file from the
nano editor with that slash in what I think is its usual place in the terminal.
When there's room in the home folder, my practice of copying and pasting the
profile and the profiles.ini file into the new installation's home folder works
OK so long as I make sure that the prifiles.ini file points to the correct profile.
I have made sure to mount the target Data partition, though I haven't incorporated
it into fdisk yet.

Magic Banana

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Joined: 07/24/2010

The path you are specifying, which should indeed start with a slash, is absolute. As a consequence, IsRelative, defined in profiles.ini, should certainly be 0, "false" in Boolean logic, instead of 1, "true" in Boolean logic. Also, I tend to believe Default, defined in installs.ini, should have the value of Name, defined in profiles.ini.

amenex
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Joined: 01/03/2015

Magic Banana is right about both issues; I put the slash in with Pluma, not nano, and it
stuck. I also changed IsRelative to 0 and start with last profile to 1, because there's
only one profile. That eliminated the popup file manager. installs.ini looks OK, as it
does list the correct profile name. Icedove came right up without any complaint. Thanks !

Magic Banana

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Notice that your Icedove profile should not be in /media. Its default location is in ~/.icedove. If you run out of space in /home, I very much doubt the storage of your emails is a significant reason. They probably weight at most ~10 GB, if you have been keeping many emails with large attachments for many years. Even if you run out of space in /home because of your emails, /media is not a reasonable place to store them. /media is supposed to only contain mount points for removable media: https://refspecs.linuxfoundation.org/FHS_3.0/fhs/ch03s11.html

amenex
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Joined: 01/03/2015

Actually, it's 19 GB; overwhelms the root partition.
The /media location is the USB-3.0-connected SATA HDD that has 1.0 TB of space, mostly this project's data.
I can process or add to it from either of the two working T420's and any of their operating systems.
For the time being, until we figure out what's causing the random freezes at :17 minutes after the hour,
I'm running the multiple-nmap scripts from the Flidas edition of Trisquel because that one seems not to be
susceptible to the freezes, and I'm saving the data and scripts to the same USB-3.0-connected SATA HDD.
I think of the T420's internal USB bus and is occupants as an internal network.

amenex
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Joined: 01/03/2015

Magic Banana demurred:
Notice that your Icedove profile should not be in /media. Its default location is in ~/.icedove.
Trying to avoid any internal misunderstandings, as we had discussed, I edited the profiles.ini file in
/.icedove/profiles.ini so that there was an absolute path to the profile in the data partition. Alas,
this morning all the hidden files had disappeared from the / folder, and I had to execute the following:
sudo mkdir /.icedove
sudo cp /media/george/Data/.icedove/profiles.ini /.icedove/profiles.ini

Otherwise, Icedove could not find my profile ... there being nothing pointing to it.
Is that what prompted your admonition ?
Or was that I now have to remember to mount the Data file before starting Icedove ?

Magic Banana

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If your emails are really on a removable disk, then /media is the correct location. It is just uncommon to have to plug a disk to access one's email account. 19 GB is not that much, given the TB disks we usually enjoy nowadays: having them repeated on two machines is usually not a problem.

What is actually your partition scheme and what occupies most of the space? Maybe your root partition is too large and the partition where /home is mounted too small. If so, you should reduce the former to enlarge the latter (e.g., using GParted from a live system such as Trisquel's). Maybe the plain text files you frequently refer to on this forum occupy most of the space. If so, they can be compressed (e.g., using zstd, which is very fast and in Trisquel's repository). Maybe some other heavy files that you do not frequently access (e.g., videos) could be moved to a removable disk. In all those cases, your Icedove's profile could then be in its default location, ~/.icedove.

amenex
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Joined: 01/03/2015

After many hassles & restarts brought on by Mate Terminal's linewrap problem, icedove problems
that seemed insoluble, random freezes, kernel panics, vanishing dot files, a fresh install of
Etiona became necessary and took far less time than tracking down errors that turned out to be
a replay of what we went through with installing Icedove after an upgrade from Trisquel_7 to
Flidas last December.
Copied profiles.ini and installs.ini from their safe haven in /media/george/Data-II/george/.icedove
to the /.icedove folder, over the system-created profiles.ini and installs.ini, and Icedove is again
up and running.