Thunderbird 78.6.0 Upgrade to Clean Install?
My Mozilla Thunderbird recently upgraded when I had close it and restart my system to work on it. I only recently went to start it back up and it wants me to setup my email account. I had several email accounts already setup before the upgrade, but it is acting like they never existed and it is a fresh installed.
I went out to the AppData and found Thunderbird folder. In Profiles, there is only one folder. Looking at the files and folders inside, it contains my previous data (I found logins.json which contains my SMTP, IMAP, and POP servers listed inside, as well as the Mail and IMAPMail folders show stored data from my accounts). When I load Thunderbird it seems to update some of the files in that same Profile, but acts like no account data is located in the system. I am not sure if this is because of changes to the system or what, but is there a way to recover all of my settings and accounts from before the upgrade?
I have a system backup that is about a week old (it backs up every day, but I only keep a weeks worth), but restoring the profile folder didn't seem to do anything.
Modified by kbrown.it
Chosen solution
In that case we are probably back to http://kb.mozillazine.org/Recovering_a_profile_that_suddenly_disappeared
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I originally wrote this for V68.. but it applies equally now. https://thunderbirdtweaks.blogspot.com/2019/09/i-lost-my-profilemail-on-update-to.html
Matt said
I originally wrote this for V68.. but it applies equally now. https://thunderbirdtweaks.blogspot.com/2019/09/i-lost-my-profilemail-on-update-to.html
Thank you for the link. I read through it, but I doesn't look like it will solve my issue. I only ever had was one profile, the display also shows just the one profile (Default). When I follow the directions for creating a new profile, when I go to select the folder I only have the one profile (Default) in the folder. There are no other folders to select. I am not sure if that will work with it being the default.
Matt said
I originally wrote this for V68.. but it applies equally now. https://thunderbirdtweaks.blogspot.com/2019/09/i-lost-my-profilemail-on-update-to.html
Thank you for the link. I read through it, but I doesn't look like it will solve my issue. I only ever had was one profile, the display also shows just the one profile (Default). When I follow the directions for creating a new profile, when I go to select the folder I only have the one profile (Default) in the folder. There are no other folders to select. I am not sure if that will work with it being the default.
Modified by kbrown.it
Chosen Solution
In that case we are probably back to http://kb.mozillazine.org/Recovering_a_profile_that_suddenly_disappeared
I was able to find a prefs.js backup that had my data in it. Changing the name to prefs.js (from prefs-4.js) and starting Thunderbird allowed me to recover my accounts. Everything seems to be there, although I might need to do some re-authentication on some.
You probably want to investigate why Thunderbird is creating multiple prefs files. The addition of numbers indicates the file was not available for writing for some reason.
The usual causes are, Profile not stored on a disk on the local machine (networks device or even cloud storage. Profile stored in a "synchronized" location on the local disk (things like drive onedrive and other cloud storage) Profile contained in a streaming backup set so every time a file is changed it is backed up. (Basically much the same as above) Profile files are being locked by anti virus because it is scanning on every change. (We recommend you do not allow on access scanning in the Thunderbird profile.
The last being the number one cause on Windows