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Copying Thunderbird files from MacBook Air HD to external HD without losing data

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  • Last reply by david

danrgfarrow
danrgfarrow
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I am trying to regain space on my 2014 MacBook Air HD, and have discovered that my old Thunderbird Mail Service is using 46 GB of storage. This will be old emails, but I don't want to loose them, so I would like to copy all the necessary folders to my external HD so I can erase them from my internal HD.

Can you pls advise me how to do this without losing or corrupting any of my Thunderbird emails or damaging any files on my Mac.

Thanks for any help/guidance you can provide.

I am trying to regain space on my 2014 MacBook Air HD, and have discovered that my old Thunderbird Mail Service is using 46 GB of storage. This will be old emails, but I don't want to loose them, so I would like to copy all the necessary folders to my external HD so I can erase them from my internal HD. Can you pls advise me how to do this without losing or corrupting any of my Thunderbird emails or damaging any files on my Mac. Thanks for any help/guidance you can provide.

Chosen solution

There are URLs for archiving, such as this one at https://www.lifewire.com/archive-thunderbird-mail-folders-117... but you want them archived on a different machine. So, my suggestion is to 1. locate the folders with older messages under the MAIL folder and copy them (there are two files for each, one with no suffix and one with MSF suffix) to the other MAC. Then, delete them with Thunderbird so that Thunderbird doesn't think they're still there. This will provide you with the complete folders and indexes for future use.

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david
david
  • Top 10 Contributor
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Chosen Solution

There are URLs for archiving, such as this one at https://www.lifewire.com/archive-thunderbird-mail-folders-117... but you want them archived on a different machine. So, my suggestion is to 1. locate the folders with older messages under the MAIL folder and copy them (there are two files for each, one with no suffix and one with MSF suffix) to the other MAC. Then, delete them with Thunderbird so that Thunderbird doesn't think they're still there. This will provide you with the complete folders and indexes for future use.