How to Back Up or Copy Your Mozilla Thunderbird Profile (Email, Settings,...)
All your emails, contacts, filters, settings and what not in one place — Mozilla Thunderbird — are great, but in two places they are even better. This is true in particular if that other place is a shiny new computer emitting the certain new laptop smell. Fortunately, copying all your Mozilla Thunderbird data is easy. You may have noticed that I did not mention backups yet. This is because you need a backup when you have lost your data — and you won't lose your data. But, of course, you can (and should) create backup copies of your Mozilla Thunderbird profile by copying it.
Back Up or Copy Your Mozilla Thunderbird Profile (Email, Settings,...) To copy your Mozilla Thunderbird profile:
Now you can restore the profile on another computer, or when problems arise.
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How to Restore a Mozilla Thunderbird Profile from a Backup Copy
Restore a Mozilla Thunderbird Profile from a Backup Copy To restore your Mozilla Thunderbird Profile from a backup location:
First, create a new profile in Mozilla Thunderbird. You will overwrite this new profile with the data you want to recover or copy. If your current default profile does not contain any data you want to preserve, this step is not necessary, and you can overwrite that profile.
- Make sure Mozilla Thunderbird is not running.
- On Windows, select Run... from the Start menu and type "thunderbird.exe -profilemanager". Click OK.
- On Mac OS X, type "/Applications/Thunderbird.app/Contents/MacOS/thunderbird-bin -profilemanager" in a Terminal window and hit Enter.
- On Linux, type "thunderbird -profilemanager" on a command line and hit Enter.
- Click Create Profile....
- Click Next.
- Type "Restoration Profile" under Enter new profile name:.
- Note the path given under Your user settings, preferences, bookmarks and mail will be stored in:.
- Click Finish.
- Click Exit.
Now, it's time to copy the files:
- Open the folder containing your Mozilla Thunderbird profile backup.
- Highlight and copy all files.
- Open the desired new profile directory.
- Make sure you choose the folder noted when you created your restoration profile. The folder name should end in ".Restoration Profile" if you created a specific profile or ".default" if you want to overwrite your current default profile.
- Highlight all files and move them to the trash.
- Paste the files copied from your backup location.
If you created a special "Restoration Profile" profile, you can rename it, of course. |
