Can I set up Thunderbird store folder on my NAS and access it from several computers?
I have a NAS unit and use it as my personal cloud,especially useful when I'm away and want to access my data from a laptop or other mobile device. I wonder if I can move my Thunderbird store folder to this NAS unit and access my mail from any device, whether at home or away.
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May work, but you might find opening a 4Gb mail file takes a loooong time over say a slow wifi connection.
May work is rather ambiguous and lacking value in response to a direct question. Wondering where slow wifi enters into this. Everything in my setup is hard wired.
Does anyone know for sure if this works, with the profile situated on the NAS, I'm thinking that I should be able to access it either directly from any of several computers with TBird installed or by VPNing from elsewhere into the computer the NAS is connected to. I'd love to hear from anyone with theoretical knowledge or actual experience with a setup like this.
No one know for sure if it will work. Issues arise with certain NAS operating systems and file systems. It is truly suck it and see territory. some NAS devices work a dream. Others corrupt files, loose data and are general pigs. Seagate devices historically have been the worse. But there is no telling really.
Your not going to get a direct answer to your ambiguous question as all NAS devices are not the same. Using a NAS or a cloud store is not a supported configuration, but some people have had it working. if it will work for you no one can guess, beyond probably.
If you read the two lines I originally wrote I make no reference to WiFi. I just said opening a 4Gb mail file might take a loooong time.
Thunderbirds internals are old, they were originally written to run on PATA drives with a transfer speed of around 100mb per second. The USB 2.0 that portable apps test the portable version of Thunderbird on has a nominal transfer rate of some 60MB per second.
The reality is you might get 130Mb a second from a Gigabit ethernet connection which may be enough to see Thunderbird not timeout waiting for data. That is if there are Zero issues and only two devices and it is not connected to a shared bus inside your computer such as a PCI bus which it shares with other devices.
So as I said it may take a looong time to open a 4Gb mail file but no one really knows what your experience will be.