you could try replacing them just in case they got corrupted in moving (like some some sort of scan they are the file with an MAB extension in your profile. Make sure Thunderbird is not running when you do the copy.

I restored appdata from a backup. There are no .mab files there.

Is it possible that the files were not backed up because the the program was open at the time?

quite possible, there is a good chance email addresses are not the only things missing.

However If there is no abook.mab Thunderbird creates one, so I hope you can see that in your current profile.

I have abook.mab and abook-1.mab.

Even from the backup when I looked at the address book, there were 4 listed. Only the first on had any data it in, and it looked pretty complete.

I added a couple of entries into the second book, and it remembers them. I shutdown the program and reopened it and they appeared.

While it was shutdown abook.mab had the contacts for the first list. Neither had info for the contacts I added to the second book. So where are they?

Actually, is there a place to find info about the address book. I have been a programmer for 40 years, and I like to understand where stuff is. I am hoping if I know where the data is I can find the lost list.

Thanks for your help.

Larry

The file format is MORK

WIKI discussion on how bad it is, https://wiki.mozilla.org/Address_Book

Mozilla Developer Network description https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Mork

and Wikipedia because it has good external reference links http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mork_%28file_format%29

Finally if you have any time at all to contribute the address book project is in desperate need of people that know what they are doing (Not me my C++ and JavaScript are poor) See https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=841598 Mike has been working on it for a long time, but has very little time to give.

Thanks Matt. I finally found a thread about address books that allows you to see what address book is in what file. Using that I have that some of the files the files were empty.

But now I know the files names, and I can search for other copies of them. Hopefully I will find something.

Cheers!

care to point me to that thread... it is something I have never really figured out.

Sure.

https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/questions/1018274

It is an interesting insight into what is going on. I am sure that the file name was backed up but empty because the file was in use. Now I am hinting back through other backups to see if perhaps I had shut down Thunderbird over night. Also I think some of it was disc corruption. I am pretty good at backing up, but this one caught me by surprise. I think in 30 years I have lost a handful of files. This time I might have lost 100.

Thanks for your help.

I will look into the address book. But I haven't been programming anything meaningful in a while. I had some issues with my head for a while. Turned out to be dehydration. Doctors were no help. I finally figured it out myself.

I have a few projects to work on, but mayne in a could of months I can have a look.