I have a lot of folders - but many are not  active at any one time. eg I have sent directories going back to 1997 eg Sent_1997, Sent_1998 etc . It would be useful to have a foreground / background arrangement of folders where folders in the background were semi-archived. They would be visible and accessible when required but not part of TB's routine search or maintenance .   They could be differently coloured in the LHS pane. It might take longer to access them. This might have the effect of preventing loss of active performance.

duplicate of [/questions/1358995] thread. 1. iNTRO - I spent an extra un-necessary year on the beta channel because of TBs Oauth2 set up problem. While there I had a major Tbird crash. Duplicates appearing , moving emails to other folders resulting in loss of said emails. incessant indexing, compacting and re-appearance of deleted contents of directories with unexpected loss of current contents. A real mess. After a month of this nonsense I only managed to recover by re-installing Beta to a new directory and copying backed up '''local folders''' manually, directory by directory, into the new Beta and checking (and or repairing) the contents, folder by folder. It took a day and a half. Arising from this experience and looking, sometimes aghast at the Beta Channe,l I suggest the following. 2. Suggestions 2 .1 Repair Tool We need to have a repair tool to rebuild a mail system just as I have partially described - you will know that there are many nuances in such a rebuild with some .sbd files not being recognised automatically and some others being recognised (trial and error methods were used to overcome these problems). In short you guys have the rule book and could easily programme a rebuild tool. What a relief it would be to know that such a rescue vehicle was at hand. 2.2 Back Up Tool As email data bases grow - mine is now 33 Gb - there has to be good back up system that users can trust. In the MS world (awful software) the back-up tools are not much good - so it would be useful for TB to do this or recommend some software for this purpose. I think TB guys should do this as Restore facilities are critical here - offering users options to recover particular email folders and emails and place them in particular locations would seem essential. 2.3 Archive I have a lot of folders - but many are not active at any one time. eg I have ''sent ''directories going back to 1997 eg Sent_1997, Sent_1998 etc . It would be useful to have a foreground / background arrangement of folders where folders in the background were semi-archived. They would be visible and accessible when required but not part of TB's routine search or maintenance . They could be differently coloured in the LHS pane. It might take longer to access them. This might have the effect of preventing loss of active performance. 2.4 Deep Archive A deep archive where the user elects to compress(ZIP) folders in the Deep Archive. Once archived these would be ignored by the system unless they were released into the foreground /background area 2.5 Purge Command When things go wrong and the indexing screws up many duplicates are sometimes created. There should be a Purge folder command when right clicking on a folder. There are other things such as better TB messaging and better documentation of the profile folder system - the existing information is too dispersed - and shoe-string - needs a User friendly approach not assuming one is familiar with shells. Do everything through DOS for consistency. Here too a tool would be useful. Best Gilbert