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Thunderbird address book seems empty after migration to new laptop

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  • Last reply by david

guy13dm
guy13dm

Hi all, After an emergency transfer of data to a new laptop for my sister there are no more contacts in her Thunderbird address book. Here are the details: Since two weeks the old laptop will no longer start up windows, no rescue methods work, only CMD is functioning. So I copied all relevant data, including Thunderbird profiles, to an external hard drive, from which I later copied said data to a brand new laptop. It took some renaming of the profiles to make her mails appear but her address book remains empty. As far as I can tell at least some of the necessary files are where they're supposed to be: there is an abook.mab.bak file in her profile but no abook.mab. There are also a bunch of abook.sqlite files. The date stamp on the sqlite file seems correct (1 August) but the one on the mab.bak is from 2020. I've been searching through the old laptop HD with CMD but I don't really know where or how to look (I use linux on my own gear so windows is exotic territory for me). Any help is more than welcome.

Hi all, After an emergency transfer of data to a new laptop for my sister there are no more contacts in her Thunderbird address book. Here are the details: Since two weeks the old laptop will no longer start up windows, no rescue methods work, only CMD is functioning. So I copied all relevant data, including Thunderbird profiles, to an external hard drive, from which I later copied said data to a brand new laptop. It took some renaming of the profiles to make her mails appear but her address book remains empty. As far as I can tell at least some of the necessary files are where they're supposed to be: there is an abook.mab.bak file in her profile but no abook.mab. There are also a bunch of abook.sqlite files. The date stamp on the sqlite file seems correct (1 August) but the one on the mab.bak is from 2020. I've been searching through the old laptop HD with CMD but I don't really know where or how to look (I use linux on my own gear so windows is exotic territory for me). Any help is more than welcome.

All Replies (1)

david
david
  • Top 10 Contributor

you can import the abook.sqlite and the history.sqlite from old profile using tools>import>import from a file. OR, you can exit thunderbird and use windows file explorer to copy.paste from old profile to new profile. There are other abook files, but thunderbird manages those.