On Mon, 14 Jun 2004, Bill Verity wrote:

>For most our our lists, I keep archives for just a short period of
>time, typically less than a year.  But a few are archived forever.
>Currently the old archives are monthly, so each year has 12 files.  I
>suspect people might visually browse recent archives but might only
>search older archives with the web or email tools.  What would the
>pros and cons be for creating yearly files for past years?
>
>Some pros the come to mind are:
>
>* Fewer files on the server.
>* Shorter screens on the archive web pages.
>
>A  con might be:
>* Larger files on the server
>* Server might balk at indexing large yearly files.

The server won't balk at indexing the files, but it might balk when
someone searches them. I just ran into a similar problem with a list that
I maintain personally for the group in which I work. We get at least 100
emails to that list daily. The emails include communications from vendors,
people in my department, and mostly status messages regarding the state of
servers and the services they run. One of my colleagues almost crashed our
Windows system when he searched for the messages he posted because there
was such a huge amount of archived data for wa.exe to look through.

When I asked L-Soft's tech support about this, Jacob succested I break the
lists into separate archive only yearly lists. The old years' lists are
archive only. No one can post to these old yearly lists. So I have a list
for 1999, one for 2000, another for 2001, and so on. This works out well,
but it was a pain to set up. I also set up the web template on the main
list to include links to the older lists.