The first thing you should do is move all your notebooks to another disk.
This way  you don't have  to worry about the  191 filling up  and forcing
LISTSERV to shut down.
 
All the  suggestions you made  can be implemented relatively  easily with
locally written EXECs. You  can for instance call an EXEC  once a week or
once a  month that  archives old  notebook files  to tape,  or compresses
them, or  whatever. It is not  practical to write a  standard compression
and archiving facility  because the methods used vary so  widely from one
system  to another,  especially  if you  want  to implement  asynchronous
archival.  A generic  facility could  go well  into the  1000 lines  with
numerous exits,  while a  program written just  to solve  your particular
needs could fit in just some  50-100 lines of straightforward code. If VM
had standard  tools for  compression and archiving,  it would  be another
matter.
 
  Eric