re :A few weeks back I took a back up of my profile to keep emails etc safe and backed up.

Backup....Are you talking about a POP or IMAP mail account?

Current account - is this Pop or IMAP ?

I need to see exactly what you have got stored in the backup profile.

In the backup 'profile name' folder:

• If POP account, click on 'Mail' folder
• If IMAP account, click on 'ImapMail' folder

• click on mail account name folder
• Make sure you can see the 'Size' column and extend window so it shows as much as possible.
• Please post image(s) so they show all the content.

Hi and thanks for your email and help on this matter. I am begining to think that the back up did not migrate the emails but please see attached files with the view you required.

Regards

PS it is an IMAP account, the gmail part brings all the backed up emails in but my other two addresses bring nothing in and they are the important ones :-(

The images you supplied show a load of indexing files that Thunderbird would use. Index files do not contain emails. All the files were dated 24 May 2020, but most have a very small size indicating there was not very many emails in the account and some were in Inbox, Sent and most in the Trash.

I had hoped that you had copies of mbox files (do not have extension) containing emails which could have been imported into 'Local Folders' mail account and then copied back onto the new server.

It would seem that you did not set up to download full copies; you were only downloading headers. This meant that when you selected to view an email, it was retrieved from the server and cached in a temp storage to faciliate you being able to read the email. It was never fully downloaded and stored in Thunderbird. IMAP accounts store all emails on the server and even if you download full copies, you have to consider them as not a true independent copy because the folders are always synchronising with server.

Are you certain that this old imap account did not manage to synchronise with new server before you performed a backup?

Please confirm that the images you posted are really from an old backup and not images showing the current empty Imap account.

General info on synchonising folders for offline use and downloading full copies. You may find this useful.

• https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/imap-synchronization#w_configuring-synchronization-and-disk-space-usage

Hi once more

Please see attached screen shot of the size of the back up file, it looks like it should contain something at that size, what do you think?

My emails were on IMAP as I mentioned, I was forced to change hoster for my domain and did the back up a week before (thought I had, anyway!) the plug got pulled and when I did the change of servers, my emails, that I had in TB all went, as they would I guess on IMAP as the new servers were clean. I'll go and take a another look in the files but it is odd that Gmail emails came and they were on the same back up? The two other hosted accounts are the ones that have lost me. I'll see what else I can find. Thanks for your help so far

Please also note the date on the back up file which is the 8 May

Just a bit more info, I did do a test back up on the new PC on a new version of TB, I added some emails, did a back up then imported but still nothing came and I was working offline. Oddly the 8 may backup has newer files in it!

On image it also says 'Location:' and says 'I:\Moz back up may 20' folder that contains the 'Thunderbird' folder.

That's the external hard drive that I saved it to when backup was done