First off, do NOT run makeactive(8) to make a new one!  Not only does this
command take a long time to run, but the result is usually garbage.  Groups
that should be marked as moderated aren't, and you'll usually create lots
of spurious groups which were deleted previously or didn't exist.  You'll
end up spending a lot of time cleaning up your active file when you're done.

Every time news.daily runs, it saves a compressed copy of the current
active file in _PATH_MOST_LOGS/OLD/ (e.g. /var/log/news/OLD).  Also,
every time a newgroup or rmgroup command is issued, the previous copy
of the active file is saved as "active.old".   Should your active file
get corrupted or deleted, you have lots of backup copies lying around.
You should also include your _PATH_NEWSLIB in your daily backups,
so that your history and active files get backed up to tape.  If
you get a catastrophic disk failure, you can get back in business
much much faster if you have tape backups of these files.

The easiest way to recover from a corrupted active file is this:
1. Shut down INN
2. mv active active.corrupt
3. cp active.old active
   OR
   cp /var/log/news/OLD/active.1.Z .   (or .gz if you use gzip)
   uncompress active.1                 (or gunzip if you use gzip)
   mv active.1 active
4. Restart INN
If INN does not do a renumber on startup (you'll know if it does if
'ctlinnd mode' hangs for several minutes on startup), then force
a renumber of the active file with:
5. ctlinnd renumber ''

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