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Missing local folders when migrating profile

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  • Last reply by jac4975

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Hi everyone. My laptop crashed last month and I'm just restarting things on a new one. I use TB with two email accounts, and for one of them (a Microsoft POP-based account) I was storing many years of older emails locally. Everything except these older messages came back after a new installation since the messages were still on the respective mail servers. I had backed up my TB profile back in January and figured that I could retrieve the older messages by restoring this profile. But those folders don't seem to be there, even in the "Local Folders" section - and now I'm wondering if they were stored somewhere else, outside of the profile, in which case I may have lost them. Any suggestions? It may be possible to retrieve data from the old hard drive if necessary, but it will be very expensive. Many thanks in advance

Hi everyone. My laptop crashed last month and I'm just restarting things on a new one. I use TB with two email accounts, and for one of them (a Microsoft POP-based account) I was storing many years of older emails locally. Everything except these older messages came back after a new installation since the messages were still on the respective mail servers. I had backed up my TB profile back in January and figured that I could retrieve the older messages by restoring this profile. But those folders don't seem to be there, even in the "Local Folders" section - and now I'm wondering if they were stored somewhere else, outside of the profile, in which case I may have lost them. Any suggestions? It may be possible to retrieve data from the old hard drive if necessary, but it will be very expensive. Many thanks in advance

All Replies (2)

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My experience is that this happens when a backup is done while Thunderbird is running, causing the files to be locked and not copied into the backup.

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Thanks, David. I don't think it was running when I did the backup, but it's possible. Hoping that someone might have another idea of something to try here short of an expensive HD rescue.