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How to backup thunderbird profile without copies of email

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  • Valiny farany nomen'i christ1

NeilCocker
NeilCocker
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My Thunderbird profile is huge. 80gb. I'm assuming most of this is email copies.

I use IMAP, and all of these emails are archived in their respective Gmail accounts.

Is there a way I can backup my thunderbird account without having to back up the local email copies (which will take days to sync with Dropbox etc), providing the fresh install of thunderbird will pull all the emails from the Gmail server to their respective folder?

In other words, which folders/files do I need to backup just to keep the passwords, accounts, folders etc, and then just let TB download the emails from Gmail once it's installed?

My Thunderbird profile is huge. 80gb. I'm assuming most of this is email copies. I use IMAP, and all of these emails are archived in their respective Gmail accounts. Is there a way I can backup my thunderbird account without having to back up the local email copies (which will take days to sync with Dropbox etc), providing the fresh install of thunderbird will pull all the emails from the Gmail server to their respective folder? In other words, which folders/files do I need to backup just to keep the passwords, accounts, folders etc, and then just let TB download the emails from Gmail once it's installed?

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christ1
christ1
  • Top 25 Contributor
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I'd certainly agree that it wouldn't be a good idea to backup 80 GB of mail every time. However, assuming that what's on the server is as safe as a local backup is naive at best. You wouldn't be the first one losing the entire email archive due to lack of a local backup.

I'd still backup the entire profile once, and then subsequent backups without the mail files. Or only those mail files which have changed.

Backup up my personal email archive to a Dropbox folder without encrypting everything prior to uploading to Dropbox isn't something I'd do.