Mozilla’s Thunderbird is a free and very popular e-mail client. Thunderbird is actually very configurable, but the methods required to change certain aspects of the program are not very intuitive. One issue that I ran into is related to doing backups. The default location for files is buried in a special Application Data folder in the Documents and Settings folder. That makes it difficult to remember that these files should be backed up along with Word documents, Excel spreadsheets or any other files that your business cannot afford to lose.
Like most people, I like to set up all of my programs so that the files created are all stored in folders within the My Documents user folder. That way, I just have to pop a blank CD or DVD into my DVD burner drive and send the My Documents folder to the disk to create a backup.
Moving the Thunderbird files is a four step process. Here is how you do it.
Step 1. Make sure that Thunderbird is closed and locate the Thunderbird file folder. In Windows 2000 and XP, you should find it in:
c:\Documents and Settings\{user name}\Application Data\
{user name} is your user account folder for your PC.
The Application Data folder is by default a hidden folder in Windows, so if you do not see an Application Data folder, check the Folder Options and make sure it is set to "Show hidden files and folders". This is found in Start, My Computer, Tools, Folder Options, View.
Step 2. Copy the entire Thunderbird folder and its contents to the new location in the My Documents folder. Copy the folder rather than moving it because Thunderbird needs to be able to find the profiles.ini file in its old location. In this example it is being moved to the My Documents folder located at c:\Documents and Settings\Craig\My Documents on my PC. Your user account name should display in place of "Craig" on your PC. If you did not set up a user account, this folder may be called Administrator.
Step 3. Locate the Profiles folder in the old Thunderbird directory at c:\Documents and Settings\{user name}\Application Data\Thunderbird. Look for the profiles.ini file. Open profiles.ini with a pure text editor, such as Notepad. Do not use Word or a word processor because these programs typically save invisible headers and formatting codes when they save a file. You need to use a pure text editor like Notepad. It might e a good idea to save a backup of the file before you alter it.
Step 4. The contents of the profiles.ini folder will look something similar to this:
[General] StartWithLastProfile=1 [Profile0] Name=default IsRelative=1 Path=Profiles/xhbhq33l.default
The Path=Profiles/xhbhq33l.default line is the code that points to the .default folder with all of your e-mails and Thunderbird’s configuration information. I know it looks like a file name, but it is actually a folder. Your folder name will be different. "xhbhq33l" is a random name generated by Thunderbird when the program is installed. Before you make changes, it might be a good idea to make a backup copy of the profile.ini file, just in case you run into problems.
You will need to make two changes to the profiles.ini file. First, change IsRelative=1 to IsRelative=0. This changes the path from a relative path to an absolute path. Second, fully specify the new path to the new location of the Profiles folder and the default file folder. The new contents of the file for my Windows XP system now looks like this:
[General] StartWithLastProfile=1 [Profile0] Name=default IsRelative=0 Path=c:\Documents and Settings\Craig\My Documents\ Thunderbird\Profiles\xhbhq33l.default
Note: the Path= directive should be on one line. Do not forget to substitute the name of your Windows account in place of my account name called "Craig". Also, remember to use backslashes, rather than forward slashes in the absolute path. If you put the directory on another drive, use the appropriate path to that directory.
After making the changes, save the file and start Thunderbird. If you got the path correct, you should see all of your old e-mail messages. New messages should now be saved in the new location and backups are now much easier to accomplish.
If you see a message like the following, it means that you did not get the path correct. Check to make sure that every character and space is correct.
The same method can be used for restoring a backup file to a new PC. The only difference is that Thunderbird will have generated a different xxxxxxxx.default folder name in the Profiles folder. Just copy the Thunderbird backup file to the My Documents folder, or the folder of your choice, and apply the correct path and xxxxxxxx.default folder name to the profiles.ini file and you should be set to go.
Update
I just rebuilt a PC and reinstalled Windows XP. I installed the latest 2.0.0.0 version of Thunderbird and set up the profiles.ini file to point to the copy of the old files from the previous installation of Thunderbird 1.5. I used the method detailed above with no problems. That should confirm that the file structures are the same between the older version of Thunderbird and the newer version.
Resources
Mozilla Thunderbird