Deja Dup backups incomplete?
I recently booted up a new installation of Thunderbird on a new laptop running Fedora Linux after my old Laptop running Ubuntu died. Fortunately, I had been regularly backing up the old machine with Deja Dup. I restored all my files from a recent backup. All my files seem to have been successfully recovered except that many locally-stored Thunderbird messages are missing, and some local folder names have been corrupted.
Since I see problems only with Thunderbird, I suspect the problem lies there rather than with Deja Dup.
Has anyone else had problems with restoring Thunderbird from backups? Is there something I might try to recover the missing messages and corrupted folders? Should I be using a different backup in the future?
Chosen solution
OK, you would have used a different set of steps then instead of my approach. My first thought is to see what is there: - click help>troubleshootinginformation - scroll to 'profile folder' and click 'open folder' - you are now in the profile. click to Mail\Local Folders folder and see what is there. I presume your reference to locally stored messages was to this folder. The contents should match the same folders from your copied profile from old machine. If nothing seems to work, you could install the importeporttools NG addon, highlight Local Folders, rightclick and select the importexport option to import mbox and then locate the appropriate folder on old profile (NOT the msf file). That always works.
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By the way, I can now confirm that the problem does *not* lie with Deja Dup. I managed to get the old laptop running again and copied the Thunderbird profile to my new machine. Even with a direct copy via USB stick (no backup utility involved), the preceeding 10 month's worth of locally-stored messages messages are missing.
The only cause other than Thunderbird that I can think of is that the new machine runs Fedora Workstation while the old machine runs Ubuntu, but, especially since they are both flavors of Linux, that seems a very unlikely cause.
Try these steps:
- start thunderbird on old PC
- click tools>export and then click 'open profile folder'
- exit thunderbird
- copy profile content to external media
- install thunderbird on new pc, downloaded from thunderbird.net
- in receiving PC, click help>troubleshootinginformation
- scroll to 'profile folder' and click 'open folder'
- exit thunderbird
- now, paste contents of exported profile, overlaying contents of profile.
- if there is a compatibilitie.ini file, delete it
- restart thunderbird
I am suspicious of alll transfer tools other than direct copies with the OS's copy facility. The above steps should work.
Modified by david
OK, once again, I am copying a TB profile to a new machine. I copied my profile (the .thunderbird folder) from my old machine, where TB works fine and all of my locally stored messages are present.
The profile contains a compatibility.ini file, which I deleted on the new machine.
I open TB and find that, once again, all locally stored messages from January 2025 onward are missing.
Does anyone have an idea how to recover the recent messages?
Chosen Solution
OK, you would have used a different set of steps then instead of my approach. My first thought is to see what is there: - click help>troubleshootinginformation - scroll to 'profile folder' and click 'open folder' - you are now in the profile. click to Mail\Local Folders folder and see what is there. I presume your reference to locally stored messages was to this folder. The contents should match the same folders from your copied profile from old machine. If nothing seems to work, you could install the importeporttools NG addon, highlight Local Folders, rightclick and select the importexport option to import mbox and then locate the appropriate folder on old profile (NOT the msf file). That always works.
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