Profile transfer keeps losing mail
So as far as I know the way to move profiles between computers is supposed to be pretty straight forward - https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/moving-thunderbird-data-to-a-new-computer
However I seem to have a problem with the process in that often times when I get the profile to the new computer when I open TB I see many of my local folders are non-exsistant. It usually takes me several times to make the move until I get the complete profile to transfer. I have even tried compressing the profile and moving it that way which never resulted in better results. Now recently I transferred another profile and it appears all of the folders showed up but maybe around half of them are empty the emails themselves never made it. And some are partial full where a folder that should have 50 messages only has 5. These are all local mails I am referring to since I keep the IMAP mail folders empty everything gets moved to local. I also checked the size of the profile folder it shows it is about the same size on both computers before and after the move around 1.5 GB. I have tried various approaches to copy from the entire Profile folder down to just the Local Folders folder without much success. It seems I just need to keep re-copying the folders half a dozen times until all messages seem to move over. This is not something new it has been an issue for several years on both windows and linux machines and the transfer is taking place between systems of like o/s and the same version of TB. Any thoughts on why this happens?
Linux Debian 11
TB = 102.5.0
THANKS
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The transfer is done solely by the OS, so all files, regardless of location within the profile should be copied. The only time that you get a partial copy is when Thunderbird is still running and has not released the files. You can verify the local folders by viewing the profile after having copied it, using Windows File Explorer.
I hear what you are saying but that is not what I am experiencing. I have tried the simple copy paste profile. I have tried the Tools/Import-Export function. I have tried the ImportExport NG add-on. Each option produces it’s own level of failure. Depending on which technique I use it may or may not export all of the mail and may or may not import the mail. After an export or a copy profile I check the mbox files and many show a value of 0 or a value that is less than that same file value before the export. So the mail is lost on export (the program is closed.) With the TB built in Tools/Impoert-Export function it exports the profile to a zip I open to look at it and all mail files look good hardly any mbox with 0 value. I import (the mail only not all the settings) into the new profile and I end up with a flat folder layout (loss of hierarchy) plus new duplicate folders added in with random numbers appended to the folder name plus half the folders are still empty or missing large numbers of emails despite that fact that the mobx files in the zip file were good. When I import using the add-on it imports the top level folders only and nothing more and no email at all despite using the options for folder structure. Just one big mess. This is going on for years. The only way it worked in the past is to use simple copy and paste but it often needs to be done several times before all emails are captured. This one I copied in a few months ago and never checked it and since then added probably somewhere around 50-100 new messages from my imap accounts so I can’t just delete this local folder and reimport using the profile a few months ago I would lose those newly added mail. I also notice that sometimes dragging and dropping a sub folder into another folder all the messages in the folder are gone when it gets to its new location. This is random and so unpredictable that the only way to safely move folders is to create new folders and copy and paste the mail. At this point the only reasonable solution is have someone spend time on this for me and get a conversion of the mbox into EML and put these local files on a windows EML viewer program. TB has been on the market long enough that I would assume moving local mail between profiles should not be a catastrophic event.