I'm looking for a way to set up a second, independent, LOCAL FOLDER
I have MANY years of emails stored in LOCAL and I keep backing them up and copying them from my desktop to my laptop. (they would go to my phone and tablet too if there ever became a tbird for Android). As you might imagine MANY of those years are rather static and only the ones for THIS YEAR gets any change - AND I do it my own way since I don't like any of the few options the ARCHIVE function offers and even there my only location choices are on my mail folder (the server) or my one LOCAL folder. IF I had a second local folder I could keep the more static archived folders there and STILL have the power of using TBIRD to read and search them and only have to backup and move the smaller folder around (I have LOTS of stuff I move around like this and my 128G SD card is getting pretty crowded!!). Yes, OF COURSE I could export all the old stuff - but then accessing and searching would have to be done as a separate operation outside of TBIRD using other tools.
Having a option of multiple LOCAL folders (NOT!!! subfolders of the ONE local folder) would allow many interesting capabilities.
All Replies (4)
Well, you wouldn't want to store 128 GB of data on an Android device, would you?
I don't see why a subfolder of Local Folders wouldn't meet your needs. A folder is a folder, regardless of its location.
Anyway you could set up an independent folder and link it in via a softlink or symlink.
Modified by Zenos
the 128G is ALL the stuff I sync back and forth with several systems.
The emails is about 17G.
A sub folder of Local Folders wouldn't do the job since it would STILL be in that one LOCAL FOLDER on my hardrive and I would STILL have to move it all back and forth when I sync up.
I do this with BATCH files and still I'm not going to parse the individual sub directories to accomplish this - much worse if I did it manually!
My local directory is called "tbirdmail" and in this case I suppose I'd name the archive one "tbirdarchive" and if MORE were allowed - I'm sure I could find uses/reason/names for them too.
No it would not all be in a single folder on your hard drive. However from what I am reading it looks to me like you are using root folders to do mail and using very unsophisticated batch files to copy root folders around. If that is the case I wish you well. You will need all the luck of the Irish eventually as lost data is probable.
Sub folders are just that that so under local folders in Thunderbird you create tbirdmail and tbirdarchive
Then you treat the contents of the folders. tbirdarchive.sdb and tbirdmail.sdb separately in your batch file. Issue resolved.
Thanks - I hadn't studied the local folder to that degree to know where everything is - that's good information.
Yet even though they would both be in separate directories those are sub directories of my local directory and therefore both in the one directory as I originally stated.
Also - there would be more in my local directory that just those two subdirectories thus that method would not get everything over to the target site - my laptop - so that it could function just as my desktop.
Two local folders would.
And yes - I did work out how to make a sufficiently complex batch file using ROBOCOPY that would parse the sub directory on the export and reintegrate it on the import - with a trick to not wipe out data on the reintegrate - two local directories would be simpler. Simpler is always better.
And no - I don't lose data.
So I guess that what you are saying is that multiple local directories is simple out of the question.
ok - thanks.
My question is answered.