Collected Addresses book has gone bye-bye
The hard drive on my antique Windows PC (a Dell desktop, 12 years old) finally bit the dust, so I replaced it (40 bucks), reinstalled the Windows 7 OS from Dell's original flash drive and updated to Win 10. I then installed Thunderbird, which immediately took in my messages back to October. I had a profile backup from last December, so I restored from that and all looked pretty good until I realized that while my Personal Address Book survived, the Collected Addresses didn't. In fact, when I look at the Address Books there is no Collected Addresses choice at all. Under All Address Books there is just the Personal.
Now I see that I have two Roaming profiles: xxxxxxxx.default and xxxxxxxx.default-release. I guess that's because the restore set up a different profile from the one created when I installed the program. In both I see history.mab, history.sqlite and history.v2sqlite. The xxxxxxxx.default profile seems to have the history.sqlite from the date of the backup, whereas xxxxxxxx.default-release has a history.sqlite with a current date, which seems to indicate that default-release is what I'm operating with. And that's the one that shows up when I open the folder from Troubleshooting Information. I don't know enough to offer more of a clinical picture here.
I guess to start I need to know what to do about the two-profile business. How do I merge them or whatever needs to be done? Will this solve the case of the missing Collected Addresses book? Or get me on the way?
Thanks for guidance.
Gekose oplossing
Ah! Well with POP, retention settings can be tricky. Sounds from your description as if yours is set to retain a copy on the server for a length of time - so the new profile was able to download the emails afresh. And, hopefully, after switching to the backed up profile the same emails were retrieved and none missing. With POP it is possible there could be a gap, if messages were loaded to the default-release profile and then deleted from the server, not reloaded when you switched over to the backed up profile. So, check in case any dropped down a crack but if you did all that in one day you should be fine!
Lees dié antwoord in konteks 👍 1All Replies (5)
Well, in nosing around Thunderbird's Troubleshooting Information I just discovered the About Profiles section. When I switched from xxxxxxxx.default-release to xxxxxxxx.default and made that the default, that did the trick: Collected Addresses is back!
Now, can I remove the default-release profile? Or shall I let it be?
You have done well already. If your accounts are IMAP, you should be fine with the original profile, but I would keep the default-release for now until you are sure everything is working as expected. Note that major updates to TB create a new profile. Sometimes there are changes to the internal architecture that mean some components may need the newer profile. However if you had installed the same TB version as your backed up version, everything should work just fine. More info here https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/profiles-where-thunderbird-stores-user-data Agnes
Thanks for this. Actually, it's POP3, so maybe that's an argument for letting sleeping profiles lie, just in case?
Gekose oplossing
Ah! Well with POP, retention settings can be tricky. Sounds from your description as if yours is set to retain a copy on the server for a length of time - so the new profile was able to download the emails afresh. And, hopefully, after switching to the backed up profile the same emails were retrieved and none missing. With POP it is possible there could be a gap, if messages were loaded to the default-release profile and then deleted from the server, not reloaded when you switched over to the backed up profile. So, check in case any dropped down a crack but if you did all that in one day you should be fine!
I leave messages on the server until I delete them on the desktop, so I couldn't have lost anything. I think I'll be OK leaving both profiles, just to be sure. At least until I decide to back up... :)
Thanks much.