Prefs.js lost all calenders and mail servers - maybe after CHKDSK?
I'm using Thunderbird since 1865 with ~15 mail servers, news feeds, rss feeds, ~10 calendars, ~10 Add-Ons and ~15 search engines. Although i have tons of backups, i am desperately missing my 2016 prefs.js, which seems to have eaten up itself without apparent reason. When i fired up thunderbird today, it asked me to setup new mail accounts. I looked into my Profile folder and everythiing is in place (seemingly), timestamps are up to date for ~15 files. Just my prefs.js has lost all lines for mail servers and calendars.
There could be some kind of correlation with a chkdsk i performed from the Ubuntu installation on the same machine, but i checked against sharing profiles between windows and linux:i had long given up on using the same Profile folders from both OSes. Sadly.
Here's thunderbird's native debug information: http://old.blausand.net/private/Thunderbird-totalProfileCrash.html
Thanks for hints on how i can reconstruct the prefs.js! (Why do bookmarks entertain their own backups folder while this crucial file hasn't even ONE automatic backup??)
All Replies (2)
Two programs For a browser they do all sorts of what I see as silly things, including backups of files that are really only state files like session.
Given Thunderbird uses Gb of storage, backups are left to the user.
Given you say your have a copy in your Linux installation I would suggest you use that to rebuild the other. There is no easy way.
It turned out that the calendar-data folder was corrupted. I renamed it and... I had to manually setup all calendars! Because lightning cannot handle calendar config from prefs.js - even for online calendars - if there's no valid offline data structure. I admit this was a serious crash, but Thunderbird definitively needs to grow a decent profile data structure.
PS.: My only offline calendar is gone forever, of course. The folder calendar-data/backup had apparently no valuable content.