Thunderbird using ~180GB of space (with duplicate/backup files ??)
Thunderbird seems to be making backup copies of all my Email Folders every few days (somewhere between every 2-14 days) and wasting HUGE amounts of storage space. As an example, in the dir: ... \Thunderbird\emailStorage\Profiles\b70fp75l.default-release\ImapMail\imap.mail.yahoo.com there are 83 files titled: "INBOX-2 (<date_code+time_code>)" (as an e.g. the most recent file is named "INBOX-2 (2020_12_25 00_37_12 UTC)". Notice that that file has NO extension. About half of these "INBOX-2" files have no extension, while the other ~half, have the extension: '.msf'. The '.msf' ones are small but the no-extension ones are huge. These 'INBOX-2 ...' files are all about 650MB each but the set of 27 similar "Sent-2 ... " files are all 2.5+ GB ! As the date stamp portion of the file name increases the file size increase, so these SEEM like progressive backup files. What I want to know is HOW ARE THESE BEING CREATED AND HOW DO I STOP IT !! ?? I have been searching this support site (and others) for hours and have not found any reference to these files as Backups or Archives.
I am currently using v.78.6.0 on Win.10. I have 7 email accounts in the current profile and there are 4 different profile dirs under "...\Profiles". About:Profile shows only 2 Profiles: 'default-release' (the "profile in use") and 'default'. The 'default-release' Profile dir is ~170 GB while the others add up to ~12GB. The 'Archiving' option for the accounts is set to 'Yearly'. The earliest of these files seems to be from 2020_06_05 if that relates to a specific version of TB.
All Replies (2)
what anti virus do you use? Lets cut to the chase a bit.
Anti virus programs that scan in the profile folder while it is in use often cause odd things, and numbered file names are one of the more common side effects. I suggest you place an exception in the anti virus product for the Thunderbird profile folders and see if the odd duplication's stop.
Note that files without extensions have the email in them and the MSF files are the index used to display the lists in Thunderbird. That you do not have all these showing up in Thunderbird is in itself strange. (have you installed the importexporttools addon at all?
Thanks for your response Matt. I use Comodo and I just added an Path Exclusion for the Profiles dir. I will keep an eye on things and see what happens.