Backing up and restoring your thunderbird Data

This how-to shows you an easy way to backup and then restore your thunderbird data including your emails

It is a good idea to backup from time to time your data, and maybe some of our most valuable data now a days are our emails, and email addresses.

And yes there are a lot of on-line applications that may take care about that, like plaxo or gmail I prefer to have all that in my PC with my favorite email client which is Thunderbird

Today I will show you which steps you need to backup and then restore to the same machine or to another one your Thunderbird data.

Depending on which distribution you are using you should have one of these directories:

$HOME/.thunderbird

or

$HOME/.mozilla-thunderbir

inside there there is a file called

profiles.ini

This is the content of mine:

[General]
StartWithLastProfile=1

[Profile0]
Name=default
IsRelative=1
Path=llbevfct.default

Backing up

tar -czf thunderbird_data.tar.gz llbevfct.default/

This will create a file called thunderbird_data.tar.gz with the content of all files inside llbevfct.default which is the directory where all my emails and other data is stored, check out for the right name of your directory.

Restoring
archive
Once you have your new Linux installation, or you if you want to restore your data in the same machine, just copy that file to the appropriate directory. $home/.thunderbird or $HOME/.mozilla-thunderbir, and uncompress it with:

tar xvzf thunderbird_data.tar.gz

then edit the file profiles.ini and change the line

Path=xxxxxx.default

so it point to your newly created (uncompressed) directory.