Thunderbird Community Forum

Helping a friend with her HP-i3 PC running Windows 11 that I setup in March of 2025. It was a new PC purchased from BestBuy in March 2025.

I had to restore the image backup of her C drive that I did in March 2025 because of a Windows problem that I wasn't able to resolve. Now that problem is resolved but Tbird has the old profile folder without her new email contacts. (Unfortunately, I did not remember to use Tbird to save a backup of her profile folder before doing the restore.)

She has a recent image backup so I can extract Tbird's profile folder from that backup. What would be the correct procedure to replace the current profile folder with the one extracted from the recent backup?

(don't currently have access to her PC so don't know the version number of Tbird currently installed)

TB guidance is to maintain separate profiles for dual-booting (Kubuntu and Win11), rather than sharing the profile. That adds to IMAP churn, but also to disk space, of course. But the biggest concern is keeping Local Folders (a very large archive which is by far the largest part of my profile) coordinated: both sides must access the same Local Folders.

The option to specify "Message Storage" for Local Folders obviously addresses that problem: both Kubuntu and Win11 can have the same NTFS Local Folders storage. At the same time, each IMAP account also has the option to specify its own "Message Storage" "Local Directory" location outside of the profile folder. That suggests two obvious questions:

1. Why not specify shared storage for each account, as well as for Local Folders?
2. After Local Folders and all accounts are shared, then precisely what, from each profile, cannot be shared between Kubuntu and Windows? Does this bring us back to asking why the profile cannot simply be shared?

[Years ago, when my email accounts were POP, I had no problem sharing a profile between WinXP and an earlier Ubuntu variant. (Of course with POP, they had to share.) Is today's separate-profiles guidance related to IMAP accounts or to some other change in TB design?]