Postbox Data File

I have been playing around with Postbox and I really like its interface and its features.
I found out that Postbox uses a single file* to store all of the emails for a particular account and my dad told me that he dislikes email applications that store all of their data in one huge file because if something happens to that database all of your email could be gone forever. And that backup applications like Time Machine take longer to backup that file because it always has to backup the whole file when something changes.

How likely is it that a database from Postbox, Thunderbird, etc with 1000's of emails could corrupt?

*For each mailbox/folder

I use Postbox, so I looked in my Library to see for myself what the database comprises, and I see multiple database files… one for each "box" (Inbox, Sent, Drafts, etc). Why are you under the impression that Postbox stores it all in one single file?

I made a small mistake there, what I meant was for each mailbox/folder it creates one file where all its contents are stored in. So if I have lots of emails in a folder called Friends all the emails would get stored in a file called Friends.
I guess what I want to know is, could one of these database files corrupt and loose all of those emails.

McYukon said:

I made a small mistake there, what I meant was for each mailbox/folder it creates one file where all its contents are stored in. So if I have lots of emails in a folder called Friends all the emails would get stored in a file called Friends.
I guess what I want to know is, could one of these database files corrupt and loose all of those emails.

Click to expand...

Well that's always a possibility. But as far as I know, all email clients store all messages for each box in a single database just like Postbox is. I've certainly never seen it any different for any email client I've used over the years. I can't even begin to imagine the immense file clutter of having a single file for each individual email message.

I've been using Thunderbird since before it hit version 1.0 and I have been using the same database for about 6 years now. It has been through two version changes and a hop from Windows to Mac in that time, and nothing has gone wrong with it. However, I still kept regular manual backups just in case anything went wrong. I backup the entire profile, which currently stands at around 3GB, so it takes a little under 5 minutes to backup. Time Machine backs up files as they are updated, so I imagine it would take even less time for Time Machine to make backups.

Long story short, there's nothing wrong with the way programs like Thunderbird and Postbox store their emails. Plus, if you combine them with IMAP email services, even if something does go wrong, it's a simple matter of just downloading all the emails again from the server.

Thank you all, that's what I wanted to know.