Help - Troubleshooting information - about:profiles

And select the profile that you want to use.

Dear Scooter, Thanks for that. Under 'About Profiles' the 'User' & 'User - default' show only the one Profile I am trying to link to TB. This is the profile into which I loaded the contents from Carbonite of the previous working profile, following their instructions on recovering the TB profile. Is there another way of connecting this profile to TB? The 'Open Profile' link takes me to the same in use profile, but gives a different address on my PC to the one I can acess for TB in Windows Explorer. Puzzling! Regards, Peter

The problem with many proprietary backups is that they backup while Thunderbird is running, virtually guaranteeing a backup that will not restore. Assuming that is not your problem, do this:

1. locate the appdata\roaming\thunderbird folder in the backup
2. be sure that thunderbird is not running but is installed
3. in windows file explorer, locate the c:\users\<yourid>\appdata\roaming folder and paste your thunderbird folder there. you will be prompted to overwrite whatever is there. Allow that.
4. now, start thunderbird, if the profile is not corrupt thunderbird should start ok.

Dear David, Many thanks for your help. I downloaded a new clean profile from Carbonite and used the TB profile manager to set it up and make it the default profile, but no improvement. I have also uninstalled TB and re-installed it with no improvement. Regards, Peter

install Thunderbird open thunderbird and navigate to the open folder button in the troubleshooting information. Close Thunderbird once the windows file explorer opens in your current profile.

Now copy the contents of the original profile into the new one, replacing all files like prefs.js. Make sure the copy includes sub folders. I have seen lots of folks that do that copy and end up with only the files in the folder not the entire profile. I assume they don't know about Ctrl+A to select all before they copy anything. Yet others copy the p4rofile folder into the existing profile folder so it is a sub folder of the new profile. Again this will not work. So unless you are prompted to replace files you did something wrong. Strop and work it out.

Restart Thunderbird and it should "just be there"

Dear Matt, That didn't work - I have tried it several times before just as you describe. At least this time TB logged into GMail to send and receive e-mails. Any other thoughts? Peter

Go to C:\users\username\AppData\Roaming\Thunderbird\ Make screen shots of the contents of the "Profiles" folder and of the profiles.ini file

I have 3 profiles stored on Carbonite; the first 2 don't work so I am downloading the final one to try that. I have just found the 'profiles.ini' file on Carbonite - it hadn't downoaded when I restored TB - and downloaded that to the TB folder, so am only part of the way to providing screen shits. Peter

Won't comment on your typo (maybe not a typo) of the last word :) . If you are getting multiple profiles from your backup there is one folder for each one - I have only ever had 1 profiles.ini. running linux. Can you locate your current profiles.ini file on your computer? I know tbird auto-creates a brand new profile on upgrades and makes it the default without so much as a neveryourmind leaving your old one in place. You may want to do your own editing of the .ini file on your computer using notepad. AFAIK all your profiles will show in one .ini file . The structure is awkward but fairly well documented on line. Do you know which profile folder is last known good one? Its important to get that name and save it. Each profile has its own folder bearing the profile name within the folder holding the .ini. It can be confusing at first but may give you insights into the issue. If you get to this point you may delete the unneeded and keep your own. Mine is in a folder named gj6azsgx.default and looks like this:

       [Profile0]

Name=default IsRelative=1 Path=gj6azsgx.default Default=1

[General] StartWithLastProfile=1 Version=2

[InstallFD621D5DEBA8CC6A] Default=gj6azsgx.default

I think the last 2 lines are informational - hope this helps...