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Moving Thunderbird Storage

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  • Last reply by pacifica7

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I need to move my storage location from the default on Win 11 (user>app data>roaming etc) to My Documents folder on the same drive (C:). Reason being I cannot include the app data folder in my daily backup schedule. I have read a couple of examples but they are not clear to me. Can someone give me a clear process without any geek talk. I would truly appreciate it. Thanks.

I need to move my storage location from the default on Win 11 (user>app data>roaming etc) to My Documents folder on the same drive (C:). Reason being I cannot include the app data folder in my daily backup schedule. I have read a couple of examples but they are not clear to me. Can someone give me a clear process without any geek talk. I would truly appreciate it. Thanks.

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You can do that, but you risk data loss, slow performance and generally a much degraded experience all round. It is discouraged. why would you want to do something like that anyway as there are no user updateable or really readable files in a Thunderbird profile. Certainly nothing that could be considered a document. Any backup tool that can not be configured as to what is to be backed up is of questionable value. It is decades since I saw anything that basic. Cloud sync type tools like Google Drive and OneDrive are not suitable for making Thunderbird backup at all.

What backup product are you using? It in itself can be a serious risk to dataloss in Thunderbird, so be very careful here. Thunderbird tends to corruption issues if files it is accessing are also being backed up at the time. If Thunderbird is running it is using it's files. Certainly a corrupt backup will occur at the very least. Perhaps use the back-up tool in the importExportTools addon to make a backup daily that your backup tool can read in Documents if you genuinely can not come up with a better location to backup from. https://addons.thunderbird.net/en-US/thunderbird/addon/importexporttools-ng/?src=ss

Storage in appdata is treated differently by many intrusive things like antivirus programs and moving what is essentially a database into a documents folder will often see these applications treating the huge files like a word documents.

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I am using Win 11's backup utility for File History which runs a few times a day but also the System Image Backup, which captures the Thunderbird folder, weekly. Over the weekend I had a big problem with TB and managed to loose all my emails - my fault. However I felt fortunate to have a copy of the folder on the System Image Backup, albeit a week old. Thank you for explaining the dangers of backing up appsdata storage - new info for me. I will go and explore the link you included on your response. Cheers!