Same profile on 2 computers; trying to recover one week's worth of emails
Long back story: My still-under-warranty work laptop was making a grinding noise. Remote diagnosis was a bad hard drive. Amazingly, I have on site repair (it must have been a special promo deal) but they had to order the replacement hard drive and hook me up with a technician. Figuring was going to lose everything on that hard drive, I made a copy of my Thunderbird profile (and many other files), installed Thunderbird on another laptop, restored the profile and kept working. The second laptop was supposed to be for non-work stuff, so it has less memory, a smaller HD, slower processor, etc.
Two days later the on site tech came and installed the new hard drive but the computer was still grinding. He determined the old hard drive was fine, it was the fan that needed to be replaced, so he put in an order for a new fan. I mentioned that the power connector was loose, so he also ordered a new motherboard. Two days later he's back with the fan and motherboard, but the power connector isn't part of the motherboard, so he has to order that part, and now it's July 4th weekend. He came back today and replaced the power connector, and, because there was nothing wrong with the original hard drive, he reinstalled that, too.
All in all, I used the non-work laptop for seven days. I backed up the Thunderbird profile from the non-work laptop, restored it to the work laptop, started Thunderbird, and realized that I had screwed up and backed up the profile in the appdata/local/thunderbird folder rather than the appdata/roaming/thunderbird folder. Then I started Thunderbird. There is a week's worth of email missing from my work laptop, but now there is a day's worth of new mail on it that isn't on the other one.
I save a lot of email. I use layers of folders and subfolders. My profile folder is 41.7 GB. Windows 10. POP mail server. Automatically download new messages and nothing is saved on the server.
Is there a way to selectively copy messages received and sent within a specific date range and somehow fill in that missing week?
I'm afraid that if I backup the roaming profile from the second computer and restore it to my work computer, I will duplicate everything in my ginormous profile.
Chosen solution
Yes, you can copy or selectively save the week's worth of messages from the non-work laptop to th work laptop, using an add-on called ImportExportTools NG. Add it to Thunderbird on both laptops. Restart Tbird when prompted. The add-on will give you new options when you right-click on messages or their folders. Select the missing messages, right-click them and use the "save selected messages" option which is added by the add-on. You can then save the messages as eml files or mbox files. With eml, each message is saved as a single eml file. With mbox, all the selected messages are stored in a single mbox file. Choose whichever format you prefer, then on the work laptop, simply right-click the target folder, e.g Inbox, and choose the ImportExportTools NG option and you will get the options to import messages from eml or mbox files. Use separate folders to organize and store the saved messages, so that you can import them into appropriate folders on the work laptop.
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Chosen Solution
Yes, you can copy or selectively save the week's worth of messages from the non-work laptop to th work laptop, using an add-on called ImportExportTools NG. Add it to Thunderbird on both laptops. Restart Tbird when prompted. The add-on will give you new options when you right-click on messages or their folders. Select the missing messages, right-click them and use the "save selected messages" option which is added by the add-on. You can then save the messages as eml files or mbox files. With eml, each message is saved as a single eml file. With mbox, all the selected messages are stored in a single mbox file. Choose whichever format you prefer, then on the work laptop, simply right-click the target folder, e.g Inbox, and choose the ImportExportTools NG option and you will get the options to import messages from eml or mbox files. Use separate folders to organize and store the saved messages, so that you can import them into appropriate folders on the work laptop.
Thank you! This appears to have worked perfectly.
You're welcome.