How do I back up my address book and email?
My computer crashed and I had to get the operating system replaced--or something like that. When I got it back, I was able to use my back-up program to recover all of my documents, but all of my POP3 email and address books were still gone.
2 questions: 1) Is there any way I might be able to recover any of my old email or address books? 2) Exactly where does THUNDERBIRD save my email and address books so I can add this location to my Norton backup program?
Alla svar (3)
You need to learn about Thunderbird's profile. Given what has been done to your computer, your old profile is probably irretrievably lost.
If I'm understanding this correctly, THUNDERBIRD is all screwed up.
When I first put THUNDERBIRD on my computer several years ago, it generated an email profile and gave it a unique name. This name started with a random, computer generated 8 character file name. All of my email information was then saved to this profile, and regularly backed up to my external hard drive.
BUT THEN, my computer crashed. I re-installed THUNDERBIRD, which then generated a new unique 8 character file name. My Norton backup utility has no way to associate the original 8 character random file name from several years ago, to the new 8 character random file name just generated.
My original email is most likely still safely stored on my external hard drive. All that needs to happen to recover it, is that THUNDERBIRD needs to figure out how to associate the random file name it generated several years ago, to the random file name it generated earlier this weekend.
Two issues.
1. You should be backing up the Thunderbird folder in appdata. Type %appdata% in the start menu to get the location. The profile.ini file in that folder contains the location of the profile and other profile manger settings. Everything under it is worthy of backup as it is only empty folders and your profile. Having the backup start at Thunderbird also makes automatic the backup of any newly created profiles.
2. The profile mangers is used to associate profiles for use. http://kb.mozillazine.org/Profile_manager The profile manger when told to create a new profile using the old folder name will simply use the named folder, not replace it.