I've been meaning to try this tool for backing up. I'm curious if anyone else has tried this.

https://github.com/rustmailer/bichon

> As I'm sure the author is aware, Restic will do hash-based chunking so that similar files can be efficiently be backed up.

> Even if the order of the mbox's messages are ~random, Restic's delta updates will forego large attachments.

I forget the exact number, but the rolling hashes for Restic and Borg are tuned to produce chunks sizes on the order of an entire megabyte.

Which means attachment file sizes need to be many megabytes in order for Restic to be much use, since the full chunk has to fall within the attachment. — You'd lose 0.5MB at both ends of each attachment on average, so a 5MB file would only be 80% deduped.

Nothing against Restic, but it's tuned for file-level backup, and I'm sure it wouldn't be as performant if it used chunks that were small enough to pick apart individual e-mails.

I suggested the author check out ZPAQ, which has a user-tunable average fragment size, and is arguably even simpler than Restic.

The ZPAQ file can then itself be efficiently backed up by Restic.

Instead of the native format for e-mail archives? Supported by every MUA ever made? Not really, no.

How would that help 99.5% of their user base?

How strictly do you define need? I've been living as an adult long enough that there have been countless times I've searched for photos and emails from one or two decades ago. I distinctly remember the first time I met an Inbox Zero person. It was so important to her to militantly delete everything she had dealt with, and to me, the disadvantages from that practice far outweigh the advantages.

Maybe not “need” in the strictest sense, but there have been more times than I can count where digging up old mail has either made things much faster and easier or helped me answer a random question that popped into my head about something that happened ages ago.

Old SMS, iMessage, Telegram etc messages have been useful from time to time too for similar reasons.

Both can also serve as exceptional time capsules that provide windows into past “eras” of life. I occasionally kick myself for not having archived mail and messages from a couple of defunct email addresses and chat apps… without them there’s a hole spanning a few years where visibility is limited.

> Everything else gets deleted as soon as possible.

What's the advantage to deleting? It's easy to ignore anything old and disk space is cheap. Do you delete old photos?

At least a few times a year. Usually looking for old orders either model number or "how old is this thing" or how much it cost over time

All the time. I read an interesting thing about someone online, and that name strikes me as someone I have interacted with. I search my email archive, then reply to that thread or start a new one to catch up. All of them have been super happy, “wow! You replied to our email from 10 years ago!”

I do have “Clean Inbox”[1] because I don’t see or interact with them, but I keep them. The only emails I see are the actionable “Unread OR Flagged.”

1. https://brajeshwar.com/2024/email/

I have, but very rarely. I could count on one hand how often I’ve needed to dig back more than half a decade ago.

Back when I used Gmail I just kept everything personal and work related but when I moved away and started paying for email storage I took a different approach. It didn’t make sense for me to pay considerably more storage for something I almost never use.

I ended up backing up all of my emails outside of the last 5 years and stored them on an offline drive where I can reference them as eml files if I ever need it.

Going forward once a year I’ll export and purge the oldest year in my account.

I backed up lots of emails that I deemed precious, but I still search through email first, because sometimes it's just easier to search email than to search my backups.

Also, oftentimes I search email not so much for the content, but to find the timestamp associated with a particular event. I have had to search old email metadata a few times when I get an unexpected question related to time (for example, gmail will ask when you created the account as part of its account recovery process).

It has happened, but it's rare.

I let it pile up, rarely delete anything except marketing emails. Over 30K emails in my gmail inbox.

I've enjoyed digging up an old flight itinerary to see how much I paid back in 2015 or just looking at the messages a company replied in support and realizing I'm not buying from them again because they didn't fix the problem.

Yes, looking for old documents proving things for the government.