Computer crashed. Used Carbonite backup. Restored backup to new computer. Reinstalled T-bird (5 times now), always get Profile Missing error. How to fix?
My old computer crashed, but was backed up by Carbonite. I restored the backup to a new computer and reinstalled Thunderbird. I followed the instructions from Carbonite for restoring my Thunderbird profile, which matches articles in this support community. I deleted the contents of the Profiles folder from the newly installed Thunderbird and copied my old Profiles folder content (only one folder) from the backup files into the new location at appdata\roaming\thunderbird\profiles. I received this error message: "Your Thunderbird profile cannot be loaded. It may be missing or inaccessible." I uninstalled and reinstalled Thunderbird. This time I tried launching it without any changes to the Profiles folder. Got the same error message. I've now uninstalled and reinstalled Thunderbird five times, but have yet to be able to open the program, whether using the new Profiles folder contents or the old Profiles contents. Any help you can give me will be greatly appreciated. Thanks.
Chosen solution
Okay, this got me a lot further than ever before! But then I had a different problem. After following the instructions above, I was able to open T-Bird. It opened a window asking me to set up my existing email account. After completing that and giving all the permissions, T-bird immediately started to download emails from my Inbox. But it did not remember any of the folders from my crashed computer. So I checked the Profiles folder and discovered there is a 3rd profile folder. (My backup Profiles folder contained 2 profiles -- not sure why but I know which one TB was using.) So I closed TB, deleted the recently created profile, and restarted TB. I got the same message as above: "Your TB profile cannot be loaded."
In the process of writing this and trying to get TB to see the right profile, I noticed, in addition to adding a new profile, there was also added a Notepad document containing code. It looked like it was pointing TB to use the new profile folder. So I simply deleted the new profile folder and inserted one of the old ones. Now it works! Except that it created 490 empty inboxes (literally) for one of my email accounts. Not sure what that's about, but I'm so glad to have my TB email account back, it will seem like no trouble to delete them. Hope this additional information helps others.
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These kinds of problems usually arise from copying a profile without including the necessary data that points TB to the profile folder. If you can copy the Thunderbird folder from the backup (the folder that contains a Profiles folder, which in turn contains the profile folder), place it in the same location as the Thunderbird folder that exists on the new computer (first, delete the existing Thunderbird folder).
https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/moving-thunderbird-data-to-a-new-computer#thunderbird:mac:tb60
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Okay, this got me a lot further than ever before! But then I had a different problem. After following the instructions above, I was able to open T-Bird. It opened a window asking me to set up my existing email account. After completing that and giving all the permissions, T-bird immediately started to download emails from my Inbox. But it did not remember any of the folders from my crashed computer. So I checked the Profiles folder and discovered there is a 3rd profile folder. (My backup Profiles folder contained 2 profiles -- not sure why but I know which one TB was using.) So I closed TB, deleted the recently created profile, and restarted TB. I got the same message as above: "Your TB profile cannot be loaded."
In the process of writing this and trying to get TB to see the right profile, I noticed, in addition to adding a new profile, there was also added a Notepad document containing code. It looked like it was pointing TB to use the new profile folder. So I simply deleted the new profile folder and inserted one of the old ones. Now it works! Except that it created 490 empty inboxes (literally) for one of my email accounts. Not sure what that's about, but I'm so glad to have my TB email account back, it will seem like no trouble to delete them. Hope this additional information helps others.