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How to correctly clean up long-used Thunderbird profiles

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  • Last reply by sfhowes

Bill Bach
Bill Bach
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I have a user who had issues with Thunderbird crashing upon load, so I started digging into her profile. While doing that, I found an old "cache" folder which had been last touched in 2018 taking up 1GB of disk space. Turns out that this has been superceded by Cache2 and it was simply wasting disk space, so I trolled through all of our long-used profiles and deleted these files. Whew.

Now, I am trying to find out what other "gunk" has collected over the last 17 years of using Thunderbird! In that same user's profile, I have a bunch of ancient files and folders including a bunch that are 2018 and older. Some of them appear to be archaic logs (i.e. TestPilotErrorLog.Log), but can these just be deleted, or do they need to be replaced by empty files? Others, like 52608742.s, appears to have the same contents as signons3.txt -- but then there is a separate signons.sqlite, too. Are these old text files just itching to be deleted? Similarly, the "Calendar" folder has two files that were last updated in 2006 -- garbage? What about the myriad "prefs-#.js" files (where # is a digit from 1 to 7, not shown)?

Is there any guide on cleaning profiles? Also, can the Cache2 folder be purged? This user is using POP, so ALL data is local, so we don't want to lose anything, but it looks like cleanup is long overdue here.

03/01/2005 09:11 PM 24 defaults.ini 03/01/2005 09:11 PM 24 components.ini 05/31/2006 12:59 PM 459 52608742.s 07/16/2006 01:52 PM 10 persdict.dat 08/16/2006 08:50 AM 8,796 impab-1.mab.bak 05/25/2007 03:03 PM 0 urlclassifier2.sqlite 07/16/2010 02:48 PM 504 mailViews.dat 07/16/2010 02:48 PM 16,384 secmod.db 07/16/2010 02:50 PM 594 signons3.txt 07/16/2010 07:00 PM 32,768 urlclassifier3.sqlite 08/09/2010 11:25 AM 49,152 storage.sdb 07/19/2011 03:08 PM 3,621 extensions.rdf 07/19/2011 03:08 PM 126,087 xpti.dat 07/19/2011 03:08 PM 190,371 compreg.dat 01/18/2012 10:40 AM 24 urlclassifier.pset 02/16/2012 11:50 AM 65,536 search.sqlite 04/03/2012 10:37 AM 2,129,920 testpilot_week_in_the_life_results.sqlite 07/27/2012 02:41 PM 2 search-metadata.json 06/07/2013 01:33 PM 98,304 chromeappsstore.sqlite 10/07/2013 06:36 PM 15,360 signons.sqlite 04/09/2014 09:37 AM 1,008,112 TestPilotErrorLog.log 08/15/2014 04:03 PM 29 times.json 08/19/2014 12:58 PM 524,288 blist.sqlite 09/23/2014 10:46 AM 20,489 extensions.log 10/18/2014 08:26 AM 458,752 extensions.sqlite 10/19/2014 09:57 AM 524,288 addons.sqlite 05/07/2015 10:28 AM 6,004 mimeTypes.rdf 06/30/2015 09:01 AM 47,253 localstore.rdf 05/22/2016 05:53 PM 16,601 search.json 07/28/2016 08:31 AM <DIR> Calendar 07/28/2016 08:31 AM <DIR> ImapMail 07/28/2016 08:32 AM <DIR> Mail 07/28/2016 08:32 AM <DIR> OfflineCache 11/01/2016 01:39 PM <DIR> gmp 05/19/2017 04:09 PM <DIR> webapps 05/10/2018 11:15 PM 1 _CACHE_CLEAN_ 05/14/2018 09:47 AM 27,953 blocklist-gfx.json 08/14/2018 09:46 AM 848 pkcs11.txt 08/14/2018 09:46 AM <DIR> safebrowsing 08/16/2018 06:06 PM 294,912 key4.db 08/16/2018 06:07 PM 98,304 webappsstore.sqlite 09/12/2018 10:46 AM 139,100 blocklist-plugins.json 11/07/2018 10:29 AM 181 extensions.ini 12/11/2018 05:47 PM 575,941 blocklist-addons.json 12/12/2018 11:33 PM 638,976 cert8.db 12/12/2018 11:33 PM 16,384 key3.db

I have a user who had issues with Thunderbird crashing upon load, so I started digging into her profile. While doing that, I found an old "cache" folder which had been last touched in 2018 taking up 1GB of disk space. Turns out that this has been superceded by Cache2 and it was simply wasting disk space, so I trolled through all of our long-used profiles and deleted these files. Whew. Now, I am trying to find out what other "gunk" has collected over the last 17 years of using Thunderbird! In that same user's profile, I have a bunch of ancient files and folders including a bunch that are 2018 and older. Some of them appear to be archaic logs (i.e. TestPilotErrorLog.Log), but can these just be deleted, or do they need to be replaced by empty files? Others, like 52608742.s, appears to have the same contents as signons3.txt -- but then there is a separate signons.sqlite, too. Are these old text files just itching to be deleted? Similarly, the "Calendar" folder has two files that were last updated in 2006 -- garbage? What about the myriad "prefs-#.js" files (where # is a digit from 1 to 7, not shown)? Is there any guide on cleaning profiles? Also, can the Cache2 folder be purged? This user is using POP, so ALL data is local, so we don't want to lose anything, but it looks like cleanup is long overdue here. 03/01/2005 09:11 PM 24 defaults.ini 03/01/2005 09:11 PM 24 components.ini 05/31/2006 12:59 PM 459 52608742.s 07/16/2006 01:52 PM 10 persdict.dat 08/16/2006 08:50 AM 8,796 impab-1.mab.bak 05/25/2007 03:03 PM 0 urlclassifier2.sqlite 07/16/2010 02:48 PM 504 mailViews.dat 07/16/2010 02:48 PM 16,384 secmod.db 07/16/2010 02:50 PM 594 signons3.txt 07/16/2010 07:00 PM 32,768 urlclassifier3.sqlite 08/09/2010 11:25 AM 49,152 storage.sdb 07/19/2011 03:08 PM 3,621 extensions.rdf 07/19/2011 03:08 PM 126,087 xpti.dat 07/19/2011 03:08 PM 190,371 compreg.dat 01/18/2012 10:40 AM 24 urlclassifier.pset 02/16/2012 11:50 AM 65,536 search.sqlite 04/03/2012 10:37 AM 2,129,920 testpilot_week_in_the_life_results.sqlite 07/27/2012 02:41 PM 2 search-metadata.json 06/07/2013 01:33 PM 98,304 chromeappsstore.sqlite 10/07/2013 06:36 PM 15,360 signons.sqlite 04/09/2014 09:37 AM 1,008,112 TestPilotErrorLog.log 08/15/2014 04:03 PM 29 times.json 08/19/2014 12:58 PM 524,288 blist.sqlite 09/23/2014 10:46 AM 20,489 extensions.log 10/18/2014 08:26 AM 458,752 extensions.sqlite 10/19/2014 09:57 AM 524,288 addons.sqlite 05/07/2015 10:28 AM 6,004 mimeTypes.rdf 06/30/2015 09:01 AM 47,253 localstore.rdf 05/22/2016 05:53 PM 16,601 search.json 07/28/2016 08:31 AM <DIR> Calendar 07/28/2016 08:31 AM <DIR> ImapMail 07/28/2016 08:32 AM <DIR> Mail 07/28/2016 08:32 AM <DIR> OfflineCache 11/01/2016 01:39 PM <DIR> gmp 05/19/2017 04:09 PM <DIR> webapps 05/10/2018 11:15 PM 1 _CACHE_CLEAN_ 05/14/2018 09:47 AM 27,953 blocklist-gfx.json 08/14/2018 09:46 AM 848 pkcs11.txt 08/14/2018 09:46 AM <DIR> safebrowsing 08/16/2018 06:06 PM 294,912 key4.db 08/16/2018 06:07 PM 98,304 webappsstore.sqlite 09/12/2018 10:46 AM 139,100 blocklist-plugins.json 11/07/2018 10:29 AM 181 extensions.ini 12/11/2018 05:47 PM 575,941 blocklist-addons.json 12/12/2018 11:33 PM 638,976 cert8.db 12/12/2018 11:33 PM 16,384 key3.db

All Replies (1)

sfhowes
sfhowes
  • Top 10 Contributor
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You could go through the profile folder and investigate whether each file should be kept or not, but I think it's a lot faster and safer to create a new profile, add the accounts and add-ons, and copy address books, calendars, mail etc. from the old profile to the new. Doing the transfer incrementally might indicate the source of crashes, if they still happen in the new profile. Help/More Troubleshooting, about:profiles, to create, delete and launch profiles.

http://kb.mozillazine.org/Transferring_data_to_a_new_profile_-_Thunderbird

(somewhat dated, but still useful)

The cache can be cleared from Preferences/General/Network & Disk Space.