Moving old mail to a new computer... what went wrong?
I'm trying to restore my Thunderbird mailboxes from my old (essentially dead) computer's backup to a new computer. My first attempt failed. I need to understand what went wrong and how to correct it.
I installed Thunderbird on the new computer and used Profile Manager to create a profile in the location where I want to keep it (in the Documents folder, to simplify backup). Then I found the place where the mailboxes were kept and copied my old mailboxes there from the backup.
Then I started Thunderbird. Instead of displaying my old Inbox and a list of mailboxes, it displayed a screen that prompted me to define my email account. OK, that's fair; if the account information wasn't in the files I copied, Thunderbird would have to do that. After I defined the accounts (there are three), I quit and restarted Thunderbird, and it displayed my Inbox and mailboxes.
But not quite as I expected. I expected to see the mail that was on the old computer when I last backed it up. Then I planned to download mail to get everything that came in after that. Instead I found that Thunderbird had erased everything I copied over, then downloaded the new mail without me asking it to.
Now what? The new mail is still on the server, so I can repeat the whole process if I have to. First, though, I need to understand what went wrong.
כל התגובות (3)
One of the fundamentally worst things you can do it place your profile folder in the documents folder. The outcome will eventually be the profile data will be lost or corrupted. Primarily this is because the very nature of Thunderbird mail database is not compatible with the AV scanning and streaming backups that are to often be found in documents folders. Like cloud backup etc
See https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/dedicated-profile-thunderbird-installation This issue may be related to that.
I don't understand what you mean that "the very nature of Thunderbird mail database is not compatible with the AV scanning." Does the database format incorporate viruses or virus-like data? If it did, I would have to find a new mail reader... as would every other Thunderbird user. If it doesn't, there is no reason why AV software should mess with it.
I've been using Thunderbird since Eudora lost its support. I have kept its profile in the Documents folder from the start. I have never had a speck of trouble because of that, and I see no reason why I should now.
With that out of the way, I hope someone can help me figure out what went wrong with my conversion.
Is this a POP account? The reason you were prompted to define accounts is that thunderbird did not 'see' your old profile so it started over. If these were POP accounts, they would have started fresh, so old data would be lost. Please confirm this, and we can then help. To activate the profile, these steps may work:
if you're comfortable with doing a bit of technical work, do this: - exit thunderbird if running - click to c;\users\<yourid>\appdata\roaming\thunderbird\profiles.ini <== this is a simple text file - open with notepad or other text editor and adjust to point to the profile folder that you copied from old computer - exit and restart thunerbird - that should pick up your profile as it was on old computer
If you're uncomfortable with that, let me know.
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