E-mails missing from Profiles folder recovered from Time Machine
Had to wipe hard drive on my iMac when an El Capitan upgrade had an issue. After finally getting El Capitan running, I re-installed the latest Thunderbird, and found a recent copy of the prior Profiles folder from Time Machine. Upon initial re-start of TBird, it insisted on a name for my E-mail, so I supplied it with 1 of the 3 inbox names that I had been using, then shut it down. I found the newly created Profiles folder, renamed it aside, and copied in the copy from Time Machine. TBird didn't like that, since the subfolder of the new Profiles had a different generated name. So, I renamed that xxxxx.default subfolder to match the new TBird install, and it came up. The spinning wheel appeared for a long time, and I thought that might be because I had so many messages in my various accounts. As you may have guessed, this is a POP E-mail account.
But it has been several hours. Unfortunately, the contents of SOME of my mail folders is missing. My 1st E-mail address is very lightly used, so I'm not sure I can claim that the empty Inbox is an error, but I'm suspicious thatI'm missing 2-3 messages. My 2nd E-mail gets sporadic messages, but I know we had messages in both Inbox and the Sent folders. Clicking on Inbox just gets the spinning wheel hustling. There is no SENT or DRAFT folders at all. However we have messages in Trash! The 3rd E-Mail gets a ton of activity, and the Inbox frequently has pages of messages that we have kept, as well as pages of SENT mail. All of those folders are present, but clicking to see the Inbox just gets the spinning wheel treatment. However there are messages in the Drafts, SENT, and TRASH folders. Color me confused!
Then we had a large Saved Mail folder under the Local folder. We are talking 30+ folders, some of which also had sub-folders. All that the new TBird shows are empty Trash and Outbox folders.
I was pleased to see that the Address book appears to have recovered our Personal and Mac OS X books. But we used to have a ton of listings in the Collected Addresses folder, which is now empty.
When I stop/restart TBird, the spinning circle returns in the upper corner of the Home tab. Am I just too impatient? Could the spinning wheel actually be working on getting everything back, eventually? Or have I missed some critical step in this process?
I would appreciate any tips.
All Replies (5)
After initially starting Thunderbird, it would create a new profile folder name in the 'Profiles' folder; something like 'xxxxxxx.default' where the x's are letters and numbers. Thunderbird would then have asked to create a mail account. At this point you did not need to create any mail accounts because you were about to reuse your old profile. No matter if you have done this already, but they are about to get overwritten.
In Thunderbird Help > Troubleshooting Information click on 'show folder' button this would open your new profile folder name showing all the default files and folders - these are the ones that will get overwritten when you paste in the contents of the old profile. see image below showing all the files and folders I'm talking about - some are hidden due to scroll bar.
Then you would close Thunderbird - this is important.
Access your backup old profile folder name and open the folder to see a load of files and folders that look similiar to the new profile folder which you currently have open.
You would copy all the contents - the files and folders in the old profile folder name - not the actual profile folder name itself, but all of it's contents such as 'Mail' folder etc. Paste all of those files and folders into the new profile folder name overwriting any files and folders of same name.
then restart Thunderbird.
The response confirmed to me that my alternative process yielded the same result as you described. But as I look at my Time Machine backup file, it appears that some of the folders expected to be found in my MAIL folder/ subfolders, are missing.
I was told by Apple support that I could not use TM to recover a file, but had to navigate to the files I wanted to access for a given TM backup set. I'm finding that not all files are present in any one TM backup set, which would account for why other files/documents/folders seem to have not been recovered completely either.
Seems like I'm going to have to learn more about TM than I intended!
Thanks for your help.
Toad-Hall, Well, as I thought about my original reply, I realized that my replacing the new profile folder with my old one, with the xxx.default sub-folder renamed to match the new one, was NOT the same thing as you had recommended. That ignored the fact that the new xxx.default sub-folder had more files than the old one. So I started over, deleted TBird entirely, re-installed w/o attempting to configure any accounts, and then just copied my recovered 32 files on top of the new pristine files in the xxxx.default sub-folder. That left 15-20 new files that were not overlaid. But, when attempting to restart TBird, it tells me that "A copy of Thunderbird is already open." and won't start, even after a full re-boot. I don't know how to get around this. Any clues?
I guess if I keep searching this site, I may actually figure this out. By getting rid of the hidden .parentlock file, I was able to get TBird to launch. It then complained about all my local directory mappings being invalid. They weren't, but those files were not secured to allow access by my new OS X User account. So correcting that got me what looks like a functioning TBird again. However, I am still faced with the loss of some Mail subfolders which were AWOL from my Time Machine backup. Apple has documented that and opened up a case with the Engineering group. As I see that not a few folks were complaining about the Mavericks version of TM not backing up everything, I may be another casualty, as that was what I've been running prior to the leap to El Capitan which started my whole nightmare. This is starting to remind me of some of my bad old days in PC land!
Despite the fan boys, the operating system is not all that relevant. Apple, Microsoft, IBM, Mozilla it does not really matter what the company name the result will eventually be the same. The software will at some point let you down. Just the same as a car really.
Despite everyone's best efforts software like engineering is as much an art as a science and error will slip through. It is however unfortunate you did not detect you had bad backups before you needed them