Pruning of NewsPro Directories

[voripteth]

I was looking at the NewsPro data directory to see if I could locate a log file and I discovered over 2000 NPR files. I imagine that these must be the news articles that NewsPro downloads and assembles into attachments. Why do I have so many?

Typically I use download & save attachments to download files. Does NewsPro clean up the NPR files afterwards? I would imagine it must or I'd have many more files lying around. The big question is why I ended up with so many in the first place?

Assuming that I'm not currently downloading articles, its okay to delete these NPR files, right? It was over a gig of NPR files in that last directory. Fortunately I still had about 6 gigs left on the drive but that's alot of temporary storage!

[Tha*Lunat!k]

You could open a global message filter and use the criteria "Messages" "Are" "With Bodies". This will show any messages with downloaded bodies, you may find many files here and there that are making up those .npr files (binaries only... text bodies are stored elsewhere). You might need to disable autosupport for partials in case it's not just whole files that have bodies.

If you download a file that isn't complete on the server or all pieces couldn't be obtained by NewsPro then it may remain downloaded but incomplete, and therefore could not be saved to the hard drive. These type of attachments are auto-cleaned every some odd days, I forget how many.

Make sure in Properties > General under "Saving attachments" you have it to checked to delete bodies. I have mine set to delete bodies and mark the headers as read.

[alex]

If you delete .npr files manually - in the header lists newspro will show the headers as having bodies, the only way to synchronize that (unless you don't care) is to invoke file menu->reset database, or if backup is enabled - to kill newspro and to restore the database. Apart from .npr files headers are contained in sto.dat/cnt.dat (small article bodies).

There are two options that affect deleting bodies when you delete headers or headers are deleted: properties->general, 1. saving attachments, 'delete bodies' (I assume 'delete headers' is checked) and 2. delete bodies when delete headers. If these options are not checked - when you delete headers - bodies will be preserved and can be seen through edit menu->show deleted headers. By default the options are checked so you are not supposed to have such bodies unless you unchecked the options.

Also there are bodies of partials with missing parts, e.g. you started to download something but only some parts could be downloaded, eventually they disappear from servers. There is also automatic handling of such bodies - in partial menu->delete such bodies automatically from time to time is checked by default. It happens once in about 10 days.

Unless you want to delete .npr files and to reset/restore the database - an unconventional way - first invoke partial menu->delete bodies of partials with missing parts in all groups. If the bodies are gone - this is it.

If not - like it is proposed above - open a global filter. Also invoke edit menu->show deleted headers (for the case you changed the defaults even for some time in the past and have bodies with 'deleted' headers), you should see everything. To see the newsgroups a body belongs press Alt+F2. If you uncheck partial menu->autosupport for partial messages - you shouldn't see anything new if you invoked deleting bodies of partials with missing parts.

[voripteth]

Thanks for the suggestions. I'll look into it.