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After a Windows 10 Reinstall, are my old emails gone?

MitchPixx
MitchPixx
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After encountering many problems with Windows 10, yesterday I carried out a complete reinstall. As a result, many applications were deleted (but Windows assured me that personal files were retained) including Thunderbird. So today, I downloaded and reinstalled Thunderbird, but it has created a new ***.default profile folder (which is currently empty). I didn't backup the Thunderbird profile before the reinstall (I thought there would be something similar to the old Outlook .pst file).

Have I lost my 8 years or so of emails?

Do I need tissues?????

After encountering many problems with Windows 10, yesterday I carried out a complete reinstall. As a result, many applications were deleted (but Windows assured me that personal files were retained) including Thunderbird. So today, I downloaded and reinstalled Thunderbird, but it has created a new ***.default profile folder (which is currently empty). I didn't backup the Thunderbird profile before the reinstall (I thought there would be something similar to the old Outlook .pst file). Have I lost my 8 years or so of emails? Do I need tissues?????

All Replies (1)

user01229325
user01229325
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I have heard of other people that update operating systems without doing a backup have found their data in a folder called windows.old.

Generally Microsoft only worries about data from their applications. Everything else is on it's own.

Backups are a good idea even without messing with the operating system. Believing that email is any kind of permanent storage is risky. https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/profiles-where-thunderbird-stores-user-data