Please explain in more detail what 'The profile on my computer' means.

On the trouble shooting page of thunderbird, in the application basics, there is a profile folder. if you click on the show folder(local drive) it shows you your profile and where it is located on your hard drive. You are supposed to be able to copy and paste that information onto another drive that has Thunderbird and have all of your email, addresses and folders tranferred to your new hard drive and your new Thunderbird. My profile hasn't been updated for over 2 years and when I just reinstalled a hard drive on my computer and tranferred my profile there are no addresses, no folders and no older emails. That is why I need to know how to update my profile on Thunderbird.

I don't think anyone here understands what you mean by updating your profile.

If the profile is in use, Thunderbird manages it. No intervention is required by the user.

If you have copied it over and you get an empty profile in the new Thunderbird then it is likely that you have either copied the wrong stuff or you have put the copy in the wrong place.

You are supposed to be able to copy and paste that information onto another drive that has Thunderbird and have all of your email, addresses and folders tranferred to your new hard drive and your new Thunderbird.

That is the way it works.

I ... tranferred my profile there are no addresses, no folders and no older emails.

Please explain in detail what you did to transfer the profile. Also explain exactly what you did wrt Thunderbird after installing the new drive.

I copied the profile onto a flash drive and onto a CD. I the tried to paste the information onto the new drive in the same thunderbird application basic profile folder after I had installed Thunderbird. It did not update that folder and I had no addresses or folders. I tried again with the CD. I still did not get my addresses or folders. When I looked at the original profile folder on the old Hard drive the dates there were from 2014. The copy and paste did not work!

I copied the profile onto a flash drive and onto a CD.

What exactly did you copy? Please provide the full path and the name of the profile folder you copied.

Wasn't the flash drive good enough? Why onto a CD?

I the tried to paste the information onto the new drive in the same thunderbird application basic profile folder after I had installed Thunderbird.

Please provide the full path where you copied 'the information' to. What does 'the information' mean? Please be specific.

It did not update that folder and I had no addresses or folders.

What does 'not update' mean? What does 'that folder' mean? What addresses or folders didn't you have?

The copy and paste did not work!

That certainly isn't a Thunderbird problem.