On 5/1/2020 10:55 AM, Frank Slootweg wrote:
boggle!

If you apparently did not mind to delete all the old articles, then
why did you keep 580,000 old articles in the first place!?

Simple, because I had no idea what the purpose of any of these files in
this folder were for in any detail, what was important, and where
exactly data resided, so I just backed up everything. That way I
wouldn't have to recreate everything from scratch, and go through hours
of debugging. I've had situations were just 1 important file goes
missing which screws up the entire configuration, and trying to find
that one missing file among half million is a needle in a haystack.

So now after the deletion, I'm down from half million to only about 600
files. And I did a test backup, and the backup went from over 8 hours,
down to only 2.5 minutes! My feeling is that perhaps a lot of those
half-million files were just left over from decades of junk that
Thunderbird did not clear, even though it said it was clearing them.

Yousuf Khan