I have created a profile backup but not been able to open any folders or files so that I can see if all are backed up OK and read the text of emails?
After the complete loss of my SSD and replacement with a new hard drive, it was possible to reinstate nearly all the Windows Live Mail emails on TB because I had backed them up on another drive which was unaffected by the crash.
But having worked through the way to back up the TB profile, I cannot open anything from it to see whether all the emails were actually backed up OK. The previous transfer was only possible from the WLM backup manually by highlighting/dragging - took some time with 42,000 emails, i.e. the computer company's initial efforts to transfer in one go failed.
So I want to be sure that the profile backup works alright and it is all there. This means being able to see all the folders and read the actual emails to compare with the imported directories on TB.
The attachment is an extract of examples of "File" and "Msf File" and file sizes. It would be a great help to see what is included in these.
All Replies (2)
Use the Profile Manager or the Profile Switcher addon to connect Thunderbird to the backup profile to view it. But visually checking is a poor way to test for completeness, especially with that number of messages.
Generally speaking, if you'd just copied a profile and wanted to check its veracity, it would be useful to run a diff over the original and backup profiles. But I take it that you're not in that happy situation.
A profile contains files that employ various formats (mork, sqlite) and messages themselves may be obfuscated to various levels (mime encoding, url encoding, html, base-64) so there's no guarantee that you'd be able to read very much of it if you open it directly from your file manager.
When I first moved a profile to Windows 10 from Windows 7, it seemed that it hadn't copied the full depth of the profile tree. I don't know if it was finger trouble on my part or yet another thing that Microsoft had screwed up (why do successive version of Windows become harder and less productive to use?) but after a few attempts it went away and stayed busy for minutes rather than seconds and did successfully copy the whole thing. For critical jobs, I have come to trust robocopy rather more than clicking around in the gui.
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For messages, you need the Mail and ImapMail folders and most of their contents. Messages are stored in mbox files, which have no extension (eg Inbox, Sent, Trash etc) and subfolders are managed via sbd folders. You don't really need the msf files.
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