Gach Táirge Community Forum

Three weeks ago I attempted to migrate my TB profiles from a 2014 mini-mac to a 2024 mini-mac. I thought I did a better job of backing up my profile using CCC than I actually did. In the migration to the new Mac I lost all my subfolders from the last 20 years. Apple created a new Profile and 2 restoration Profiles on the new Sequoia based mini-mac. I wasn't familiar with these and panicked. I copied those files, took them back to the original mac and tried to follow Toad-Hall's method of restoring the subfolders recommended to bmack1 on 23/11/22. However, I failed to carry out the step of going up two levels in the path of the Library to copy the entire "Thunderbird" file and only copied the Largest restoration file. This in turn, "contaminated" the 2014 original Thunderbird mail profile and only an Inbox and Trash subfolder remained. Today, after 3 weeks of searching and reading the generous contributions of this community, I came across a post explaining that the "sbd files" will show the subfolder headings I created in the original sought after Profile. And I found it!!! My problem is I have re-read Toad-Hall's method of re-installing the original Profile and tried to carry that out to the letter by placing the old Profile within a Thunderbird folder and switching it with the current one. But it's still listed as the "Restoration qqg...file" and probably shouldn't be, but I don't want to go any further and risk losing it because I feel I almost have it. So any guidance would be greatly appreciated. Thank You.

I’m running into a limitation with Firefox profiles involving the original Profile Manager (about:profiles) and the new Profiles menu in the toolbar.

I previously created multiple profiles using the original Profile Manager (about:profiles), for example profiles A, B, and C. These profiles still function normally and can be launched through about:profiles, but they do not appear in the new Profiles menu in the toolbar.

I also tried using the “Copy this profile” option available from the new Profiles menu. This made it clear that the feature does not work with profiles created via about:profiles. For example, when I open profile A, I expected that I could use “Copy this profile” to copy profile A into an existing profile like profile B (which was also created using about:profiles). However, this is not possible. Profiles A, B, and C remain isolated from the new Profiles menu and cannot be accessed, copied, or managed through it.

At the moment, profiles created with the original Profile Manager (about:profiles) can only be accessed through that manager and cannot be transferred into the new Profiles menu in the toolbar.

Is there an official fix or a workaround that achieves the same result—specifically, transferring or integrating all existing profiles created with the original Profile Manager (about:profiles) into the new Profiles menu accessible from the Firefox toolbar?

Hi folks

When I tried to start up Thunderbird this evening, it has taken me to a set-up page. I seem to have lost all the settings, all my previous (about 3000 !) e-mails in my Inbox.

I obviously don't really want to set it all up again, but it has been working for years without a problem, and then suddenly this happens. I had now a 'warning' message saying that Mozilla Thunderbird wants to make changes to your computer - do you accept? I don't want it to make any changes unless it is to revert back to how it was.

Can anybody help me?

Thanks.

Hello Thunderbird Team I am facing a crisis and am praying you can help me. I have been using Thunderbird since 2021. I had setup my account and archives by year containing messages in Folders (Inbox, Sent & Deleted). During a recent laptop migration, I accidentally deleted my profile on my old laptop. I immdeiately recreated it. However now all email stored in my inbox has disappeared. Second, I cannot seem to locate the archives. So I have 2 requests for urgent support: 1. How do I locate the messages in my inbox prior to deleting my profile? 2. How can I recreate the archive with folders? I can see that the profile folder is a massive 22 GB. So the data is there somewhere. Please help me recreate my email profile so I doi not face a business crisis. Thank You Warm regards Milind

Hello,

We are trying to automate updating Firefox ESR from 32bit to 64bit. There seems to be an issue with getting user's profiles to properly migrate for ESR. If we do a plain 32bit uninstall and 64bit installation, a new "default-esr-1" profile gets created (which is expected behavior from these Mozilla docs for new installs). But, when we set the MOZ_LEGACY_PROFILES=1 policy, this reverts to using the "default" profile instead of "default-esr" profile that was previously in use.

Are there any known ways around this which does not require user intervention to manually change back to the "default-esr" profile?

Thank you

I use Thunderbird 115.18.0 on a Windows 7 machine. I wish to transfer all my Thunderbird data to a machine running Linux Mint 21.3 which has Thunderbird 128.12.0esr. I have not been successful after many tries. Could this be because the Thunderbird revisions are different? If so, can I get 115.18.0 to install on my Mint machine? If not how should I proceed? I have already tried creating a new .thunderbird directory with ********.default directory from the other machine. I have also tried a new .thunderbird directory with a the ********default-release directory as directed by one site.

20 years of emails apparently gone. I have been trying to add TB to a new laptop.

I used the export function in TB and was directed to create a zip file since it was over 2GB. I used 7Zip to view the file and it did not show up in the program. I did this a few times and it kept doing the same thing. When it actually worked I got about 2% of the emails. I believe that, as a result of doing this, that the profile was corrupted by the process of creating a zip file. The result? The original profile on the old laptop is no longer valid. Most of the time when I tried to unzip the file it displayed an error message. I have been through so much over the last few days I cannot remember the entire error but it had the word invalid in it. A red banner across the top of the screen.

I have scoured all my devices for profiles and have tried every one I could find. I was told that using old profiles without them going through the process of TB versions that unexpected results may happen. The latest result, which happens with every profile I use is what is in the attached image. Nothing in or under the inbox, and all this under the outbox.

Is there anything I can do to fix this?

Fire Fox - This profile was last used with a newer version of this App - Create a new profile.

After logging into my account, I saw a Fire Fox page showing new features. Upon downloading Fire Fox, I saw the the above message. I didn't want a new profile, but there wasn't an option to close the window and to just continue to use the newer version that was already installed ???

I tried Control / ALT / Delete . Upon restarting it showed the same message! I uninstalled Fire Fox, which surely has not helped things.

Am I able to restore the profile from the "newer version"? Otherwise, I will probably have to setup Fire Fox from scratch and have lost all bookmarks.

Thanks so much for your assistance. Myles

I have backed up the data regularly before, but in the new Windows 11 pc, I cannot find the data.

It used to be "C:\Users\Jim\AppData\Roaming\Thunderbird\Profiles\itfho9h2.default" on the old Windows PC which went bonkers. Now should be "C:\Users\Jim\AppData\Roaming\Thunderbird\Profiles\i3ls19ra.default-esr", but when looking in the "C:\Users\Jim\AppData\Roaming\" folder, Thunderbird folder is not there with the others. But that is where Thunderbird data is supposed to be according to Account Settings, Message Storage, Local Directory.

So, how do I find where the data is so that I can back it up?

Thanks.

So I have a bunch of Firefox profiles I want to set up a new profile and I want to set up the profile switching with in that profile perhaps by creating a bunch of profiles from the about profiles page and then replacing those profiles with the old ones as I don't see a way to just import old profiles in the UI. How do I go bout doing that like copy and move exactly what exactly where.

I'm struggling to understand where Thunderbird stores everything on a Windows computer so that I can use my incremental automated backup system to keep things backed up.

This support article :

[- Where Thunderbird stores your messages and other user data]

only mentions about the <user>\AppData\Roaming\Thunderbird\Profiles folder but there is also a <user>\AppData\Local\Thunderbird\Profiles folder that appears to be used and needed.

There is a ton of other conflicting 3rd party information out there so I'm hoping for a definitive answer here.

My question is : Can I backup just the '<user>\AppData\Roaming\Thunderbird\Profiles and <user>\AppData\Local\Thunderbird\Profiles and be assured that I will be fully able to recover my email client in the case of needing a complete reinstall ?

Linux User So. I recently followed a Mozilla guide, previously posted, and something that I did, or changed, I now have a very annoying "profile" name in the title bar. Further to that, I now have an additional menu option called "Profiles", with --"profile --Add Profile

Manage Profiles

I have never had or seen these items, except when I've moved my profile from an old computer to a new computer, using the console of "firefox -P" command.

It is becoming very annoying as I only have one profile, and I don't want an more.

Question. How to I block the display of 'profile information' ? Thanks

I just update firefox but all my none of my bookmarks loaded. I share my computer with my husband. He has a different account on this same computer and his bookmarks are showing up on my side, but mine are nowhere to be found. Previously we have had separate bookmark lists and all was fine. I don't know where my bookmarks went.

How do I get them back and put on "my side" and still have my husband's on his side?

I recently had a hardware crash on my fedora machine and transferred my thunderbird backup to my mac. I have a new fedora machine and want to transfer my thunderbird profile from the mac to the fedora machine. The problem is that Fedora is currently at version 128.12.0 and the mac is currently at version 141.0.

In response to a previous question https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/questions/1513367 I got a suggestion (which I have not been able to make work). 'if you Exit Thunderbird and access profile name folder, then delete the 'compatibility.ini' file, you should be able to use the profile on an older version.'

Here is the revelant directories on the mac

``` bradbell>ls Library/Thunderbird/Profiles y0mvyr8l.default

bradbell>cat Library/Thunderbird/profiles.ini [General] StartWithLastProfile=1

[Profile0] Name=default IsRelative=1 Path=Profiles/y0mvyr8l.default

bradbell>ls Library/Thunderbird/Profiles/y0mvyr8l.default/ | grep compatibility compatibility.ini ```

I think I should put y0mvyr8l.default in $HOME/.thunderbird but I am not sure what should I change ?

When i upgraded Firefox my old profile doesn't show up now. I found my old profile under about:profiles but when i click on the Launch profile in new browser i get this message, "You've launched an older version of Firefox. Using an older version of Firefox can corrupt bookmarks and browsing history already saved to an existing Firefox profile. To protect your information, create a new profile for this installation of Firefox" I did create a new profile but how do i get my old saved data, add ons etc to the new profile?

My old Windows10 computer died, but I have an external backup with my Thunderbird profile folder. In the meantime, I have been able to resurrect an old Windows10 computer to continue receiving email, but was not successful transferring the backup profile. Thus, I have "new" profile on this second computer containing only the recent emails not in the backup profile.

I've purchased a new Windows11 computer. My question is: How can I merge my old emails in the backup profile with the recent emails received after the backup was made? In other words, is it possible to merge two separate profiles into one? Thanks.

Illinichip

We are currently rolling out a profile management solution based on Ivanti User Environment Manager. In order to configure file includes and excludes in the profile management tool, we have to “standardize” the Firefox profile path in the filesystem. We have implemented a PowerShell script, which reads the currently used profile from %appdata%\Mozilla\Firefox\install.ini, renames the appropriate profile subfolder to “firefox.default-esr” and replaces the entries in installs.ini and profiles.ini.

The script seems to be reliable. However, for around 10% of the users, we are seeing issues when the user launches Firefox after the “firefox profile migration” happened. Firefox opens but none of the GUI controls is accessible. Firefox is completely unusable. See screenshot attached.

We do have workarounds to resolve this issue, such as completely wiping the %appdata%\Mozilla\Firefox folder and let Firefox re-build everything from scratch. But we are still trying to find the root cause the issue, because our customers have more than 100k clients, what will be a big impact and hard to handle for the helpdesk.

We are currently unable to reproduce the issue on test clients. Even copied Firefox profile folders form affected clients don’t show the issue on other clients.

Therefore we want to find out and ask for your help:

- Is there a supported way to “standardize” the filesystem folder name of the Mozilla Firefox (ESR) profile of a user? - What are the files within a Firefox profile that are required for the profile and the application itself to properly start? - Do you have any idea which files in a Firefox profile (in a corrupted state) could cause our issue?

I'm setting up Firefox on a new computer. I haven't done this for a while and the interface has changed, so I'm not sure how it works.

I want to move my Firefox profile to a directory in the Documents library to simplify backup. Following the Mozilla instructions I found, I opened about:profiles and clicked the Create New Profile button. I deleted the contents of the directory that Create New Profile created and copied the contents of the default profile directory to it. The last step is to tell Firefox to use my new profile instead of its default.

But the about:profile page lists three profiles: default-release, default, and my new one. The first two have a Set as default profile button; the last does not. So it appears that I can tell Firefox to use the default-release profile or the default profile, but there's no way I can tell it to use my new profile. I can only Launch profile in new browser -- presumably something I'll have to do every time I run Firefox.

This makes no sense. How can I tell Firefox to use my new profile -- not to launch a new browser with it, but to use it, period? If I can't, why can't I? Every version of Firefox I've ever installed up to now allowed this.

Also, the default-release profile section of about:profiles has the note "This is the profile in use and it cannot be deleted." So it appears that Firefox uses the default-release profile instead of the default profile as its default profile. What is the default-release profile? Why isn't the default profile the default profile?

As of yesterday my Thunderbird account vanished, screen asking to set up an account. I am too old to be an IT expert, and I need detailed step by step guidance how to restore that account, full of Inbox emails and folders/subfolders. If it matters (depending on requirements?), my address is @verizon.net - which is pop3 but I have no problem opening the same emails on different devices, as if it were imap (verizon taken over by aol). Pain in the neck, hope to get help.

[Profile2] Name=default-release IsRelative=1 Path=Profiles/dzsmofpl.default-release [Profile1] Name=default IsRelative=1 Path=Profiles/g92ibtwu.default Default=1 [Profile0] Name=default-esr IsRelative=1 Path=Profiles/2i2jua4d.default-esr [General] StartWithLastProfile=1 Version=2 [Install712DAF5A23ABECDC] Default=Profiles/2i2jua4d.default-esr Locked=1 [InstallFEE05927A5AEB8AE] Default=Profiles/dzsmofpl.default-release Locked=1