restore email accounts from backup made via ImportExportTools in Thunderbird
Due to an apparent update to a video driver on June 7, 2022, my Win 10 profiles were reconfigured causing me to lose all profile setup data. This includes all my Thunderbird Emails. I had 4 accounts set up. All the address books are gone too which is the bigger problem. [The browser bookmarks are all gone too but not as concerning as my contacts, and calendar). I tried to copy out the user profiles but my remote drive did not get the roaming data. Not sure why. I do have several saved backups done over a few years. However, there does not appear to be a simple method to extract the saved data to recover key information. The address book and subfolders are most important. How can I do this? The back up folder names all look like this: y1cde7nd.default-release-20220601-1733
Given the increased incidence of cyber attacks, it has become very important to save critical data to an off-line location. However, one must have the tools to recover what was saved, otherwise, we are saving to a write only memory. There is something WOM about that :) Thanks for any help. peterdev@devita.com
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I'm a bit confused. You state you lost all profile setup data and also your addressbook, but the folder name indicates that all of that should be there. So, I can advise how to restore that profile, assuming it contains the information needed. Restoring is easy because TB doesn't care where you place the profile, so long as TB can be pointed to it. If not already done, install TB, but it should not be running for this next step. If you want to put profile where TB does by default, then copy your profile to c:\users\yourID\appdata\roaming\thunderbird\profiles OR place it anywhere else that you prefer. Next, you need to start the Profile Manager. That can be done by pressing Windows key and the R key and then entering thunderbird.exe -p and pressing enter. That starts profile manager. Click 'create profile' and then next and then, first, enter a name for profile, e.g., MYPROFILE, and after that, click the browse button to locate and select the profile where you stored it. If the profile has your information, all will be fine. If not, then that profile is not a full backup. I hope all works well.
Thanks David, I tried to do as you suggested but only 1 of 5 email addresses were restored. No contact lists or calendar. After considerable experimenting, I believe there is a lot more wrong here. The Laptop appears to be experiencing multiple personalities likely based on the 3 profiles I now have. Data created in my main profile does not get auto shared with that profile. Where I have noticed, a forced sharing of a folder allows all the contents to be seen. This is only a short summary of the evidence I am now recording to determine what has happened to my Schizo laptop. It appears that apps are not working as they should and save output to a different user. I believe the TB info exists but is not accessible by the one user. I have looked at merging the 3 profiles into one but I do not believe that will help with the sharing permissions or the executable paths. I will try your procedure on my older desktop that has Win 10. If you have other suggestions or test to try let me know. Thanks
If you have multiple profiles, only one is the active one. You might try browsing in File Explorer the Mail and Imapmail folders in each to see which one has your accounts. That may help in deciding which is the correct one