I have my profile copied on a backup drive, but Mozilla doesn't recognize the mail accounts. I followed instructions, but I'm missing some profile files. Help!
I had to reinstall Windows on my laptop. Microsoft tech said I would NOT lose my files and programs, but of course she told me wrong, and I lost everything.
Thankfully, I had a backup drive with My Documents, Pictures, etc! Had to reinstall all apps, including Thunderbird. Everything works on my computer, EXCEPT Thunderbird. I can open Thunderbird, but it won't recognize my old accounts and import my old emails and subfolders.
I had an automatic batch file that runs every day copying my files to a special "email backup" subfolder folder in My Documents, so that it'd be automatically copied when I had Seagate backup do a backup, essentially My Documents and all subfolders, among other data folders (Pictures, etc).
The email backup on my backup drive has all my inboxes, and is several gigabytes in size, but does not have any system files such as foldertree.json, etc. Only the inbox folders are there. I tried re-creating the inbox thru the "use an existing account" function in Thunderbird, to add two of my gmail accounts, but it does not include all of the important subfolders (including one with all my passwords!), and other special folders I had created in my old Thunderbird, and it treated all emails saved online gmail.com as new messages, so I have like several thousand "new" emails. I've done this before, 2 years ago, when I moved my stuff to this new computer, and it worked perfectly. But now this time it's all gone.
Since I have the inbox folders and all files and folders within those inbox folders, including the folders: archives.sbd and trash.sbd, plus files such as "archives" "trash" "inbox" etc, which are huge and a bunch of files with msf extensions, is there a way to recreate the folder structure so that it sees the old accounts as it used to? While I have 2 gmail accounts that I used to use with Thunderbird, I also have old non-google mail accounts that used to be in Thunderbird, which are no longer active that had old emails from a few years ago. I obviously also can't re-create those because Thunderbird tries to authenticate it and of course fails, since they are no longer active accounts online.
HELP!!! Thank you!
All Replies (1)
Check you computer for a windows.old folder in your root C:\ that is usually where windows hides everything when you do an inplace update.
As for your mail, it is there, but without the settings that give meaning to what account is what number and has what setting that is included in the prefs.js file it is useless as a backup to do more than re-import mail from and start a process of setting it all up again.
You will also most likely not have backed up your contacts. Really why do folk try to make a backup of a part of something and then want help putting the pieces back together! If you had backed up your profile folder you would not have a problem. Why copy part of it to another location to backup. Surely seagate make a backup utility that is capable of allowing you to point to the things you want backed up. The free Micrisift one does.
You can copy all the files under the Mail\Local folders location in your profile and they will be displayed when you start Thunderbird. But to be sure you probably should delete the foldertree.json file to ensure the disk folders are read and the cache from last time is not just loaded.
Make sure to create a nice new folder in local folders to use to copy the root of you files and folders into before you shut down Thunderbird, otherwise you may over write other data you want to keep in the copy process.