Thunderbird profile refuses to work after being copied to a Windows 11 tablet
This is a curious problem that I can't get my head around. I have TB installed on a Windows 7 PC, a Linux Mint 21 laptop and Linux Mint 21 on Virtualbox. I'd like to add it to a Windows 11 Surface Pro 7, but when I follow the usual procedure of coping the contents of the profile folder to the new direcory, TB launches as if nothing has changed and asks me for my email details as a new user. I have well over a dozen email accounts and several online calendars and Vcard contact lists and I don't want to manually add them all in. The OS is Windows 11 Home 22H2.
If anyone knows why this OS is refusing to let me copy & paste my TB profile is the same way that I've always done I'd be grateful. If not and anyone can recommend a backup / restore function that will copy the email accounts, online calendars and contact lists, I'd also be grateful.
If I didn't need Windows 11 for some of my work, I wouldn't be using it, I'd stick with Linux, but this is progress apparently. I hate Microsoft even though my work in I.T. relies on fixing Windows related issues.
Thanks in Advance.
എല്ലാ മറുപടികളും (4)
You need to first tell us how you're installing the profile and how you created the copy.
I installed a clean version of TB then copied the profile folder from the old installation to the new one making sure that the profile name is correct on the new machine. I've found a workaround though by installing TB portable to a folder on the new PC and copying the profile to it. I'm not sure why the usual installation approach won't work, but I've been dealing with Windows problems since Windows for Workstations 3.11 and NT4, so I'm tempted to blame Microsoft for some sort of permissions issue in copying to the app data folder in Windows 11. The problem installation was pointing to the correct profile folder but for some reason was unable to read the contents of it. Who knows?
Thanks for the reply.
Regards, Alan
If I understand what you did, copying the profile directly into the right spot is not enough. This is because Thunderbird looks at the profiles.ini file at c:\users\<yourid>\appdata\roaming\thunderbird for the name of the profile. You might do better by using tools>import>import from another installation. That will put everything in sync. If there are no errors in profile, all should be okay. Very important that you created the copy when Thunderbird was not running.
Thanks, David. What I'm doing is copying the contents of the old profile into the newly created profile folder (after deleting the contents), so the ini file on the new PC is pointing to the correct profile folder, but the contents are different I've used this process at least a dozen times and probably more on mine and clients PC's and it's worked flawlessly every time, even from Linux to Windows & vice versa. It worked fine on the portable TB install as well.
Don't worry too much, the portable installation has fixed it anyway, but thanks again for your help.