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Back Up for Thunderbird

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  • Last reply by Toad-Hall

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I have many Personal Folders where I keep important emails that I need to keep for a long time. How can I periodically make a Back Up of my entire Thunderbird Account including emails, contacts and Personal Folders so I can store it on an external Drive? My computer is a PC using Windows 10.

I have many Personal Folders where I keep important emails that I need to keep for a long time. How can I periodically make a Back Up of my entire Thunderbird Account including emails, contacts and Personal Folders so I can store it on an external Drive? My computer is a PC using Windows 10.

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If using Imap, make sure you have selected to download full copies of emails for all your folders. https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/imap-synchronization#w_configuring-synchronization-and-disk-space-usage

Using Windows 10 then by default your profile folders will be here: C:\Users\<Windows user name>\AppData\Roaming\Thunderbird

You can manually copy/backup the entire 'Thunderbird' folder and paste it into an external harddrive. Exit Thunderbird before copying the folder.

Easy way to locate folder from within Thunderbird. Help > Troubleshooting Information Under 'Application Basics' section locate 'Profile Folder' - about 8th in list and click on 'Open folder'. This opens a new window showing contents of your 'profile name' folder. Exit Thunderbird. Go up directory (3 levels) until you have selected the 'Roaming' folder. then copy the 'Thunderbird' folder. Paste into external harddrive.

Takes me less than minute :)