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Thunderbird vanished overnight, anybody know why?

  • 3 replies
  • 1 has this problem
  • 1 view
  • Last reply by christ1

ulrich76schulz91
ulrich76schulz91
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Version 24.4...Ubuntu 13.10 O/S Last night TB was working perfectly. Today it's a brand new TB that's totally empty except one of the address books is still there. The others are empty. When I press control H in 'home', the TB folder is still there, right click properties, it reads 592 items and 2.4GB. I guess that must be good news. I have two backed up versions of the TB folder. I've been reading Mozillazine help pages for hours. No joy so far. Can anybody help? Thanks for your time.

Version 24.4...Ubuntu 13.10 O/S Last night TB was working perfectly. Today it's a brand new TB that's totally empty except one of the address books is still there. The others are empty. When I press control H in 'home', the TB folder is still there, right click properties, it reads 592 items and 2.4GB. I guess that must be good news. I have two backed up versions of the TB folder. I've been reading Mozillazine help pages for hours. No joy so far. Can anybody help? Thanks for your time.

All Replies (3)

Zenos
Zenos
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Does the article in the following link help?

http://kb.mozillazine.org/Recovering_a_profile_that_suddenly_disappeared

ulrich76schulz91
ulrich76schulz91 Question owner
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Hello zenos,

Thanks for the link. I accidently stumbled on the problem, but I don't know what caused it in the first place.

I went into hidden folders by going to 'home' and pressed control H, to bring up all the hidden folders. Opened TB and saw that there were 3 folders there. The first had a path number that I hadn't seen before, the last was a small doc giving the details of the path.

The middle box was untitled, I opened it and found the folder with a path that I had seen before (jifgb91l.default), it's accompanying doc also had the right path (profiles.ini). The two together had 560 items were 2.4GB in size. The new folder was only about 35mb if my memory serves me well.

It occured to me that this new folder was the problem. I copied the correct two to another hdd, where I back up TB files. I then deleted the new folder and it's doc, and pasted the original folder straight into the TB folder from the control H first page. Checked the TB folder, the correct folder (jifgb91l.default) and doc (profiles.ini) were there. Clicked on TB, it burst into life with all of my contents. What a relief!

Have I just discovered the easiest and quickest way to restore TB from back up files, after a fresh OS install?...copy and paste the folder and doc into TB?

Thanks fo your help, I hope this helps somebody too.

christ1
christ1
  • Top 25 Contributor
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More or less. Typically you don't need to touch profiles.ini. Just copy (and restore) the profile directory ((jifgb91l.default) in your case.

You've already been told about this in the other thread you started.