You have no idea what you did and neither do I. Thunderbird's address book has an export function. The only inbuilt export I have ever discovered. so perhaps you exported some address books.

I would suggest you gain access to the hard disk on the laptop and copy the entire profile off of it without relying of product that appear to work and do not.

To the best of my recollection, I used the Export function under Events and Tasks to export the files and folders from the old machine.

I may be able to pull the old drive and attach it to the new system, but I'd rather use the exported backup if at all possible.

If it was under Events and Tasks then it seems probable that it would have operated only on calendar data. However, your extension-less files sound promising, and may well be mbox files.

Thunderbird doesn't have AFAIK a built-in export function for email. You can save individual messages as discrete eml files but this isn't a scalable method in that it can't recursively work through nested folders and retain the tree structure.

The best "easy to use" tool I know of is the ImportExportTools addon, which has a backup/export facility. Another tool that is popular is Mozbackup, but this effectively is just a simple way to backup and then zip the entire profile, and really, copying a profile is not too difficult. However the author of Mozbackup has stopped supporting it and it can no longer be considered totally trustworthy. And, to my mind, a significant drawback is that it is (was) a Windows-only program and so of no interest to OSX and Linux users.

If your files are indeed mbox messages stores then the ImportExportTools add-on may be of use to you as it can import these files.

Looks like I've got a decision to make; either pull the drive from the other system and see if I can access it with this one or try the ImportExport add-on.

I'll pop back in a while (no idea how long it'll be) and post the method used.

Thanks for the assist.

OK, I've got the old hard drive hooked up to the new computer and can access the data on it. I've found the Profiles directory on the old drive. I'm seeing some folders named with a .sbd extension, i.e. Tools.sbd. There are also a lot of files that have names such as AOL (no file extension) and AOL.MSF. IIRC, the files with no extension match the local folders I used to have - and I'm guessing the *.msf files are the data that was stored in the folders.

I don't particularly want to change the current profile to the old one, just restore the Local folders & data.

BTW, I tried using the Add-ons Manager to get the ImportExport add-on, couldn't seem to find it.

The files without the extension are the data... the MSF files can actually be deleted and Thunderbird just recreates them.

https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/thunderbird/addon/importexporttools/

Download and install from the file https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/installing-addon-thunderbird#w_a-slightly-less-ideal-case-install-from-a-downloaded-xpi-file

I finally had the time to work on this again.

ImportExportTools installed just fine. Took a little bit of research to figure out how to make it work, but it did import all of the old folders and email.

Minor problem was that it would only download into an "approved" folder, so I had to create a new one (called it Imported) and told it the Tools to import all directories and sub-directories into that one - and it did. So now all my old directories are listed under the new Imported directory. Not a big deal and I'll work on moving them out of it later.

For now, thank you to all for your help.