Yousuf Khan wrote:
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.

I can - sort of - understand that, but because these 580,000 were
giving you so much hardship, I would have expected you to look at a
few of them, see that they were just News articles and take it from
there, i.e. set/lower the News retention settings in Thunderbird.

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.

What you saw about "clearing" (the actual term is 'Compact'(ing)) is
for e-mail, not for News. This was already mentioned in this thread,
IIRC by VanguardLH. E-mail folders need to be compacted, because you
might delete some messages from a folder, so the .msf file needs to be
compacted to recover the space occupied by the deleted messages. News
articles can be deleted as well (in Thunderbird), but most people won't,
because there's no point, because you can only delete your *copy*, not
the copies on the rest of The Net.

Anyway, you should probably set the (News) retention settings,
otherwise the storage will grow again without bounds, not not in number
of files, but in number of MBs/GBs.