Thank you. I have done that on a Scandiisk and I am now doing it on a separate file on my desktop. Just trying to be sure! :) I will report later. Fingers crossed and prayers.

David, Euerka! I believe I have my addressbook! I am feeling better!

I do not have the separate directories and I do not have all the emails I needed. It is like they disappeared. So I will continue to look in other files and just see if by chance they are elsewhere.

Also is there a chance I may have my email folders, the ones that I had put individual emails that I needed to save? If so where may I try looking?

OK. I am seeing in my files C:\Users\<my User Name>\Desktop\Thunderbird\Profiles\rib0ydys.default\Mail that I have stuff marked pop.cox.net, and then the same with 1 through 6. Would that be my other email accounts I had listed? If so is there a way to access them?

FWIW, you should have two profiles, default and default-release. Before you had problems, if things were working normally, the profile being used which had all your data should have been default release.

Screen shots can be useful. https://getgreenshot.org/ is a good tool.

I assume you're looking at the backup of your profile. You were going to install 102 before continuing, and would then import the profile, as I remember.

Thank you David and Wayne. I have looked in the files I backed up. It appears those files are there. At least it looks like it.

Honestly I am not a computer person so I don't know how to access those files or put them back in my Thunderbird.

I couldn't screenshot it but I did take photos.

If someone could tell be how I might be able to put them back into my email files, I would be grateful.

Another photo showing the files. They are in

C:\Users\<My User Name>\Desktop\Thunderbird\Profiles\rib0ydys.default\Mail

did you ever install 102?

Yes. it is installed. I manually put in my email accounts and was able to retreive most of my addressbooks.

I did that by importing from my backup files.

Not sure how to or if I can import those files I see.

Please tell status. What is working, and what is not. Can you retrieve email? Can you send email? Your posts are confusing me. Thank you.

I can send and receive emails now. I had to manually put in the email, pw, etc. Each of my emails were for specific things. including my regular email. Each of my emails had other folders along with the usual "Sent" "draft" "trash" etc. Those folders were for certain emails I wanted to hold on to or needed to like with the 5013c rescue I work with. If you look at the photos, there someting called "Laska". Those were mostly emails from my father including the last one before he passed. I would like to get those back if at all possible.

I was able to get a lot of my addressbook but not all the individual ones I had made for specific things like the rescue's BOD, fundraising, etc. It appears they might be there is the backup of Thunderbird I did C:\Users\<my User Name>\Desktop\Thunderbird\Profiles\rib0ydys.default\Mail) I think the picture shows it. If there is a way to import those and salvage them, I would appreciate it.

Thank you for being patient. This has been stressful and I apologize if I am confusing you. Stressed.

If you located old addressbooks, you can try salvaging them with Tools>Import>files . As far as the old email messages, you may get someone to try and collect them all for you, but I just don't have the time to try and figure all of that. At least you're able to work again with email. Now that it's working, I encourage you to make backups regularly.

I may take an attempt. to import files. I thought I had them backed up, but I apparently didn't. I just found that out when thunderbird crashed on me. I have made sure it is being backed up now.

Thank you for your help.

David, thank you for your help and advice. What I tried didn't work so I just have to take a deep breath and give up trying....unless someone has an idea.

How do you back you your files? I have made sure I have them in my backup system, but want to make sure I am covered. If there is a better way then I will want to do that.

Thank you.

Hello celiat.

You asked the question of "How do you back you your files?" By files, do you mean your address book? Your e-mail folders? Anything and everything else?

Well, for the basics, I'll start with the address book. As you said at one time that your version of Thunderbird was 91.x.x, I'll say that myself, I am using version 91.11.0 with Lubuntu Linux at the moment, so the versions are similar enough I'd think. If you have addresses in your current address book within Thunderbird, you can go to the "Address book" option through the menu option of "Tools" and then "Address book", or you can press "CTRL-Shift-B" to open it. Carefully taking note of your individual address books listed in the slot on the left (I have a Personal Address book with all of my addresses and a Collected Addresses Address book which is basically empty), you can then select under the menu option of "Tools", the "Export" option, which will then ask you to select a filename for each of your respective address books. When I tried it, they saved them in .csv format, which is like a comma limited save format. But it is still a simple text file. You can then save the address books anywhere you want, until you add or delete an address from an address book again and want to go through the process to update the file(s) as you see fit.

Now as for your e-mail folders, that is a bit of a different story I think, depending on which protocol you use, whether POP3 or IMAP. If your folders are in POP3 format, then basically the folders will be stored on your hard drive in their respective directories and basically they are in a simple text format that is formatted for Thunderbird to read them, but you can read the messages in any text editor otherwise. All you would need to do is copy the folders that you want to save or back up from their current location on your hard drive and save a copy to another directory or location for safe keeping, whether on the same hard drive or on another device. As each mail folder would have two files associated with it, a normal file which would be the actual folder (i.e. Inbox) and a file that has the folder name ending in .msf (like an index file for the folder i.e. Inbox.msf), you can store them together or if wanted, you can likely remove the .msf files as when you restore the mail folders back into Thunderbird, they will recreate and reindex the .msf files for you. Or at least that has been my experience.

So for example, here's a visual of an account with respective folders, as seen on your hard drive: pop.mail.com <-- account name and also name of directory that folders exist in Inbox <-- folder name and also name of file associated with folder Inbox.msf <-- index file for folder name Sent Sent.msf Trash Trash.msf Drafts Drafts.msf Saved Files Saved Files.msf

So with the above example, the folders would appear in a directory called "pop.mail.com". You have 5 e-mail folders with each folder having 2 files associated with it. As I mentioned, you can likely remove the .msf files associated with the e-mail folders when backing up the folders as the next time you put them back into Thunderbird, it will recreate those .msf files. So you would/could save only the files labeled Inbox, Sent, Trash, Drafts, and Saved Files, if you so wished to back them up.

Now one piece of advice would be that when you want to restore them and have existing folders with the same name, maybe you can change the names slightly by adding perhaps a number like "1" to the end of it, so that you don't overwrite your existing folders, thus potentially causing you to lose any new additions since your last back up. And after loading the backed up folders back into Thunderbird, you could copy any messages to the new folders, if you so wished.

Now as for IMAP folders, since I don't use IMAP, I can not really comment on them but having the understanding that the mail is stored on the mail server until deleted, if you wanted to back up any messages otherwise, all I can think of is to save copies to a local folder that is not part of the IMAP e-mail profile and then back up those local folders accordingly. Otherwise with IMAP, I'd assume that you wouldn't have as much a problem with it since the e-mails would still exist on the e-mail server, as long as the account(s) in question were still active and accessible. If the accounts were no longer active and accessible, then you wouldn't be able to recover them unless you saved copies of those e-mails you wanted to save to a local source, that was again outside of your IMAP e-mail's profile.

Hope this can be helpful and that you can achieve what you are wanting to achieve.