Back up your profile.

The ImportExportTools add-on may be of use to you as it incorporates a backup tool.

https://addons.mozilla.org/en-GB/thunderbird/addon/importexporttools/

Duplicate post removed.

Zenos said

Back up your profile. The ImportExportTools add-on may be of use to you as it incorporates a backup tool. https://addons.mozilla.org/en-GB/thunderbird/addon/importexporttools/

It's a learning curve but it has all I need including automatic backups. Now to figure it all out...BIG thanks.

I downloaded and installed Importexportools as suggested.

Ok I thought all was well. I saved a backup and could read individual e-mails. Today I did another backup and can't read anything. I've tried saving in HTML, PDF Etc and nothing can read it.

Can someone give me a procedure to backup multiple email folders and what type of backup to use. Then what to read them with. The other day when I did a backup I went to the backup and was able to scan thru individual emails in a folder and by clicking on one it popped up in normal format. Today all I get is garbage. Either I'm not saving them correctly or not viewing them correctly.

You said you wanted a backup, but now you're asking how to read it. The purpose of a backup is that you can restore a program, Thunderbird in this case, to its former state in the event of a failure. The mailstore will contain verbatim the content of messages; they may be plain text, or they may use any of a variety of encodings, including quoted-printable, mime encoding, base 64, and if you use end-to-end encryption, S/MIME or gpg. Even html, which isn't strictly speaking an "encoding" can be darned hard to read in source form.

If you want an offline store of messages that you can read then I'd call that an archive. But you can't restore from such an archive.

This add-on can do either of these; it can back up up your profile and it can export your messages. Each method has its own purpose and corresponding value. But please don't expect a backup to be usefully accessible via a text editor.

If I don't want to use the addon for e-mail backups in Thunderbird, can I just copy the Profile file and use it if I ever need to restore? Operating system is Windows 10. Thunderbird version is 52.4.0 (32-bit).

ImportExport tools at this link is for v52 and says that v52 is only good "up to v52"

I'm running v57 under W10- 64bit. any thoughts?

https://addons.mozilla.org/en-GB/thunderbird/addon/importexporttools/