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Trying to recover old Address Book in Thunderbird

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  • Last reply by david

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I just did a Windows 10 clean install and re-installed Thunderbird (ver 138.0). Because of a foul-up with File History, my most recent backups did not include the Appdata directory. I found a very old backup (2018) and copied the TB profile from that, overwriting the new TB profile folder. That did recover messages, local folders, etc. prior to 2018, but the Address Book still has no entries. There appears to be some data in the old history.mab and abook.mab files that came over, but no contacts appear in any of the address books in the new installation.

Despite the age, it would be of some use to recover the ca. 2018 address book. Suggestions?

I just did a Windows 10 clean install and re-installed Thunderbird (ver 138.0). Because of a foul-up with File History, my most recent backups did not include the Appdata directory. I found a very old backup (2018) and copied the TB profile from that, overwriting the new TB profile folder. That did recover messages, local folders, etc. prior to 2018, but the Address Book still has no entries. There appears to be some data in the old history.mab and abook.mab files that came over, but no contacts appear in any of the address books in the new installation. Despite the age, it would be of some use to recover the ca. 2018 address book. Suggestions?

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try this:click tools>import>importfromafile>addresbook>MAB file that will import the MAB entries to abook.sqlite and will then be accessible by thunderbird. Do the steps for abook.mab and then for history.mab

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try this:click tools>import>importfromafile>addresbook>MAB file that will import the MAB entries to abook.sqlite and will then be accessible by thunderbird. Do the steps for abook.mab and then for history.mab

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Thanks! Problem solved!

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You're very welcome. :)

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