Okay wow, thanks, will have to look at the redownload if there turns out to be enough time, just doing a lot of back and forth yak shaving in regards to preservation with a time crunch while I also should be doing actual work 😏.

Does running archive on an existing folder w/ database hard overwrite the contents?
Right now I've got archive running at full rip for a set of channels I want to triage so very hesitant to stop the run.
As that command outputs the stream ids/timestamps so I've been able to convert that to dates and guesstimate channel[1] progress time/size.
I was using resume for a #general channel, but it's pretty blank on the output so didn't want to try that with a set.

For estimation not sure if it should be it's own thing to run separately, or during other command retry dwell time.
For running pre-emptively as it's own tool,
I was thinking more along the lines of sampling messages in channels from a given set; maybe with everything enabled(files,avatars) as default.
Then finding the first post to the last post then randomly samples in between dates.
If not fully hitting the mid point between shrinking sets of dates (?bisecting?).
Crudest I can think of not sure of a better probability approach for this.

Or for command retry dwell time, such as running as part of an archive run, or other commands.
During any rate limiting dwell time(retry_after) spit out stats; (during got rate limited, sleeping timeouts).
Though the later reeks of being more a notification thing, so stuff like metrics get left as a user responsibility.

And not sure if either should be straight stats or also track prior state for comparison, if not also a soft progress guesstimate.

[1] just noticed it seems archive doesn't processes the channels in the order given so I've got to remember to note the channel-ID or I did something wrong.

So far I think storage of messages, ?threads?, won't be as big an issue as I thought, it's more about the time it takes for messages.
Thought assets, _uploads/_avatars, for ALL channels could become problem; at least for my case so far.
Just don't have a good way to measure it all quickly.

In the here and now for estimation I've just started recording directory sizes, and writing a powershell script, so I can keep on eye on it if it gets too big, though I just noticed I think I got my size-on-disk code wrong /sigh.
etc etc Along with a bunch of other notes for a noob bumbling through slacks trapped walled garden at the last minute.

You've made a great tool here, so I'm probably making it harder on myself to learn it while trying to go full tilt.
Either I'm SOL in ~6hrs and hundreds if not thousands of years of human expertise vanishes, or might have a few more days not quite sure ¯_(ツ)_/¯.
But I'd prolly have waay more yak-shaving going on without a tool like this though.
Like doing something janky with browser-automation and html.
Not even sure if trying to preserve things is gonna having any long term utility at all lol.

archive won't operate on the existing directory, resume would. I would suggest for clarity make separate archives, there will be a merge functionality coming soon, that would be able to combine (and deduplicate) two or more archives into one, so in the end all those archives can be combined into a single large one, including files.