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Restoring Thunderbird


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I've re-installed Windows 7 on my SSD and the previous installation is un-bootable (infact I had to recover the files using data recovery software).

How do I restore Thunderbird to how it used to be? I've copied the files in Program Files, AppData/Local and Roaming.

But when I open Thunderbird nothing's changed, what do I do? :(

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What exactly do you mean by "restore" here? When I reinstall my system, all I ever back up for it is the Tunderbird folder under my username/AppData/Roaming. I then reinstall Thunderbird, start it once and close it (without setting up any accounts), then I delete the folder it creates in /Roaming and replace it with the one I backed up. I've never had this NOT work correctly.

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Well I guess I'm an anomoly :p

Everytime I launch after doing that it just asks to set up an email account :s

Read over my procedure again: launch it first, then when it asks to set up an account, cancel that and close Thunderbird. Next go to your /AppData/Roaming folder and DELETE the Thunderbird folder it just created and THEN copy your backed up folder in its place. What I'll bet is happening is that you are copying your folder there first then launching Thunderbird. All that is going to do is create a new profile inside of the folder you placed there. You could also fix it by editing the profiles.ini file to point to the correct profile folder, but that might be more advanced than you are wanting to do.

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Yeah I checked that. Weird...

Hey, could you post a screenshot of the folders under your /Thunderbird/Profiles/ along with the text of your profiles.ini file? If you have multiple folders in /Profiles, make sure to note the sizes of each. Maybe I can help you sort this out.

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Hey, could you post a screenshot of the folders under your /Thunderbird/Profiles/ along with the text of your profiles.ini file? If you have multiple folders in /Profiles, make sure to note the sizes of each. Maybe I can help you sort this out.

Sure, the text:


[General]
StartWithLastProfile=1
[Profile0]
Name=default
IsRelative=1
Path=Profiles/6onh8rpb.default
[/CODE]

There's 1 folder in /Profiles and that's 6onh8rpb.default, it's 1.31GB

Here's a screenshot of its contents:

1Er2m.png

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The folders containing your mail should be in the Mail or ImapMail folder respectively. they are in standard MBOX format so should not be too hard to reimport back into a new profile without losing mail (unless these files are already corrupt). Next time keep a regular backup!

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  • Start Thunderbird.
  • Cancel any first-run stuff about creating accounts etc.
  • Click Help>Troubleshooting on the menu.
  • There's a button that opens your profile folder - click it.

That will drop you into Explorer at wherever TB thinks your profile is currently residing. From there you should be able to correct things much like the above procedure - failing that, you could close TB at this point and then:

  • Empty the folder
  • Copy the contents of your back up into the now-empty folder

Hopefully this helps.

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Do you also have the thunderbird program files from x:\program files\mozilla thunderbird ?

I normally always backup these 3 folders if I want to preserve my thunderbird customizations and mail and settings:

\Program Files\Mozilla Thunderbird

\Users\Jason\Appdata\Roaming\Thunderbird

C:\Users\Jason\AppData\Local\Thunderbird

And simply restore these 3 back to the places after reinstall or to restore. I never had this fail on me and i'm still using the same config about 4 years later. Perhaps you forgot the Appdata\LOCAL folder.

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