Calendar delets data when drive is not explicitely activated before
Hi there, Since quite a while now I'm fighting against the phenomena that a bundle of shared ics-files, stored on a NAS in my local network are emptied from time to time. I'd been able restoring them from the automated backups in my profile folder, but sometimes it's a pain as the pretty new calendar got some data as well meanwhile and the merging needs some copy & paste. I'm sure that a couple of entries might have gone down the drain this way.
It seems it has to do with Windows 10's habit not activating mounted drives before there are not opened manually in the Explorer. However, I think Lightning should rather display an error message instead of producing empty calendar files instead if it can't get immediate access.
Any hint?
All Replies (2)
Thunderbird expects it's file storage to be local. It is not tested on nas drives. My suggestion is buy a suitable drive for your local machine if it does not have one and use the NAS for backups.
Thanks Matt for answering. The reason for using a common local "family storage" and not a local machine is that we want to share our calendars. The error should not happen due to a lack of speed as the respective drive is a solid state one. I'm not using any fancy protocols or apps, it's just pure file access linked like this, where "n" is the mapped drive on my local machine. In principle the file is linked in Lightning like this:
file:///n:\shared-documents\calendar-files\<cal-name.ics>
A direct link would work as well (and failed the same way, before I mapped the drive):
file://///<computer-name>/<our-nas>/shared-documents/calendar-files/<cal-name.ics>
I'm asking myself why Thunderbird should work and synchronize with Google's calendar and not in an internal network. I can't see the big difference as the used file format (*.ics) should be the same. What happens to users if their ISP's entry server is not available while they want to get access?
Meanwhile I pimped my Windows a bit, hoping that it will circumvent the primary mistake, not connecting the external drives correctly before the explorer got access to respective device. I found this article helpful. Today all tests worked successfully.
However, unfortunately I' can't volunteer helping to improve Lightning myself. I might be wrong, but I believe there should be a routine, preventing to produce a local new and empty calendar file without any warning if the expected external file is not accessible (for what reasons ever). All dates are there, stored locally (and fortunately backed up by Thunderbird). Why not keeping all changes and data locally until the external file is available again for synchronizing?
Matt, actually I'm using now Thunderbird from its early days and in most cases I'm a happy user. I can understand that I tumbled over a still not supported and tested case. However, please pass it to capable people as a wish.