2 years ago lost all e-mails when compacting. Now have to again. Backup?
2 years ago I lost all e-mails when compacting. Unfortunately now I have to again.
I do not want to risk losing my special saved old e-mails. How do I best back up old e-mails to another folder or hard drive?
All Replies (8)
I think you're going about it the wrong way. I allow Thunderbird to compact as and when it wants to and never have such problems.
Two suggestions for ways to preserve your current mail store:
- export everything, or
- create a new empty profile.
Neither is ideal; both have problems with ease of access to the older material.
You could make a backup of your profile. It is a good idea to have a backup anyway. You should be compacting your profile frequently, and not let a lot of junk pile up. http://kb.mozillazine.org/Keep_it_working_-_Thunderbird http://kb.mozillazine.org/Profile_backup
I appreciate the responses but do not believe I have received an answer to my question. Perhaps some people have not had a problem with compacting but if you look at the responses on the net, many people have had a problem and like what happened to me 4 years ago (not 2 as I said), they lost all their e-mails.
So yes, I am eliminating junk or non meaningful e-mails now but I do want to save my important historical e-mails. What is the best way to save those e-mails to another repository? Thank you.
Both Zenos and finitarry have good suggestions, May I make one more?
Copy or move your special emails into a new folder first. Then when you compact folders, the new folder will not be compacted as there are NO deleted messages in it. When you delete or move a message, the originating folder just marks the message as deleted, it is not actually removed from the file until you 'compact' the folder. Then the file is re-written with all of the 'deleted' messages removed, making the file smaller and faster to load, search, etc.'
TB-38.3 Win10-PC
Thank you - interesting suggesting. Might try that.
Does anyone also know about exporting as I probably have several hundred e-mails I would like to keep. Exporting them to a hard drive?
Check out ImportExportTools 3.2.4.1 by Paolo "Kaosmos" https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/thunderbird/addon/importexporttools/
TB-38.3 Win10-PC
That's an excellent suggestion from gild.
For exporting I'd suggest the ImportExportTools add-on.
https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/thunderbird/addon/importexporttools/
Thank you. I had read that elsewhere but wanted some validation from this forum.