Mod Rewrite help

I've got 10,000+ files in a folder http://www.myseite.com/acrhives/
i.e. .../archives/2000/12/, .../archives/2000/11/, .../archives/2000/10/ ...
Several years, many months of html mhonarc-archived docs.

We have so many files in this one folder, I've decided to make a
new subsite: http://archives.mysite.com/ where all the file hierarchy
that was in www.mysite.com/archives/ will be exactly reflected
in http://archives.mysite.com/ .
i.e. http://archives.mysite.com/2000/12/, .../2000/11/, .../2000/10/ ...

I'd like to permanently redirect this so good search engines
stop looking in the wrong place and start archiving only
archive.mysite.com.

I think need to mod_rewrite /archives/... so that any call for any page in
any subdirectory is automatically reflected to the new subsite
at it's mirror path and document name.

I read the apache mod_rewrite info on the web about this,
and guessed I need to use a .htaccess file like this:

# filename- /archives/.htaccess
RewriteEngine On
RewriteRule ^(.*) http://archive.mysite.com$1 [R]

Unfortunately this doesn't seem to work for anything
except a direct call to http://www.mysite.com/archives/.
(It doesn't work for http://www.mysite.com/archives/index.html,
http://www.mysite.com/archives/page2.html
http://www.mysite.com/archives/2000/12/index.html
etc.

Any suggestions will be greatly appreciated.

Chris

hort nerd wrote:

 > We have so many files in this one folder, I've decided to make a
 > new subsite: <a style='text-decoration: underline;' href="http://archives.mysite.com/" target="_blank">http://archives.mysite.com/</a> where all the file hierarchy
 > that was in <a style='text-decoration: underline;' href="http://www.mysite.com/archives/" target="_blank">www.mysite.com/archives/</a> will be exactly reflected
 > in <a style='text-decoration: underline;' href="http://archives.mysite.com/" target="_blank">http://archives.mysite.com/</a> .

 > I'd like to permanently redirect this so good search engines
 > stop looking in the wrong place and start archiving only
 > archive.mysite.com.

I think:

Redirect permanent /archives/ <a style='text-decoration: underline;' href="http://archives.mysite.com/" target="_blank">http://archives.mysite.com/</a>

.... should do the trick.

--
David Dorward <a style='text-decoration: underline;' href="http://dorward.me.uk/" target="_blank">http://dorward.me.uk/</a><!-- ~MESSAGE_AFTER~ -->