Thunderbird data. HowTo switch profiles to a backup
 

Hi :(

I accidentally deleted the Thunderbird 3.0 profile in both Ubuntu 10.04 and Windows Xp (home) along with their backups. So i really have 2 questions.
1. How to identify which files to Undelete, perhaps using NtfsUndelete?
2. How To get Thunderbird to switch to using an old backed up profiles folder.
So far the problem with my 2 is that Thunderbird just claims that a version of Thunderbird is already open (it isn't) and then closes down.

Regards from
Tom :)

Basically your whole ~/.thunderbird/ directory. As for recovery procedure there's lots of threads on LQ about the topic. Having a separate partition for /home and shutting down the machine immediately after deletion, to prevent more writes to the file system, is the best thing to do. Not having a separate partition and allowing writing to continue diminishes your chances of recovery greatly. Never boot the OS the file system belongs to (boot a CDROM or DVD like KNOPPIX or HELIX-2) and never recover to the same physical disk (other hard disk, external drive or stick). Boot your CDRM and navigate with 'testdisk' to your ~/.thunderbird/ and toggle deleted / not deleted files before extracting them. If you're unable to extract files that way you may use 'photorec' to extract any plain text files (which mboxes mostly are) but be aware the resultant files may contain fragments of anything else adjacent so you probably won't be able to load them as mailboxes but to salvage what's left.


The "Path=" line(s) in your ~/.thunderbird/profiles.ini shows the profile directories in use relative to ~/.thunderbird/.


That may be just a stray lock file.

Ahah, that is interesting. NtfsUndelete claimed the file-names were lost and didn't give me the pathnames but carefully following the dialogues in testdisk showed both. At last i have a hope of recovering the emails.

Many thanks for such a comprehensive answer
Regards from
Tom :)

Ahah, that is interesting. NtfsUndelete claimed the file-names were lost and didn't give me the pathnames but carefully following the dialogues in testdisk showed both. At last i have a hope of recovering the emails.

Many thanks for such a comprehensive answer
Regards from
Tom :)

Just to get everything into 1 thread i got a note from this blog
http://blog.nikolaidis.com/2007/10/3...0-guty-gibbon/

The 1st comment lays out an easy way to share Thunderbird between Windows and a gnu&linux, i think it might well work between many different distros & prolly BSD too (if you can get thunderbird in a BSD. Anyway, here is the comment ...

First pick which OS is going to host the profile information, then from the other Operating System run the Mozilla App (firefox or thunderbird) with the option “–ProfileManager” delete the default profile and create a new one. On the screen where you name your new profile there should be an option to set the directory to use, just put in the profile directory thats located on the other operating systems partition.