Avatar for Username

Search Support

Avoid support scams. We will never ask you to call or text a phone number or share personal information. Please report suspicious activity using the “Report Abuse” option.

Learn More

This thread was archived. Please ask a new question if you need help.

My computer hard drive crashed but I have a HP Recovery Backup of it with all the files unzipped. How can I retrieve my emails from this backup on my new comput

  • 4 replies
  • 8 have this problem
  • 214 views
  • Last reply by beemarco

beemarco
beemarco
more options

II lost my HP hard drive after doing a HP Recovery Backup using Windows 7. I now have a new computer using Windows 8.1 and I have successfully unzipped all my files including my Thunderbird and Firefox profiles,. I have installed Firefox and Thunderbird on the new computer but cannot figure out how to get my bookmarks (Firefox) or my emails (Thunderbird) off these old profiles. Just substituting the old profiles stops the applications from opening and obviously I did not create these using the application export facility. Can the application be fooled by renaming the file with the name of the new profile? or is there some internal code that the program checks. I'm totally at a loss.

II lost my HP hard drive after doing a HP Recovery Backup using Windows 7. I now have a new computer using Windows 8.1 and I have successfully unzipped all my files including my Thunderbird and Firefox profiles,. I have installed Firefox and Thunderbird on the new computer but cannot figure out how to get my bookmarks (Firefox) or my emails (Thunderbird) off these old profiles. Just substituting the old profiles stops the applications from opening and obviously I did not create these using the application export facility. Can the application be fooled by renaming the file with the name of the new profile? or is there some internal code that the program checks. I'm totally at a loss.

All Replies (4)

the-edmeister
the-edmeister
  • Moderator
more options

The Profile names have to match what Firefox and Thunderbird is expecting to find. Any difference and they may not start, or they may just create a new Profile as they are supposed to when the expected Profile is "gone".

You can rename the old Profiles to the names of the new Profiles; or you can carefully edit the profiles.ini file to match the Profile names of the old Profiles. One mistake and it's toast, though.

But IMO, the best thing to do is to go to the folder level where the profiles.ini file and the profiles folderset is located -- %APPDATA%/Mozilla/Firefox/ where you should find profiles.ini and the Profiles folder, and maybe other files / folders

Copy that whole Firefox folder from the old installation over to the new one.

With Thunderbird that should work the same as it is based upon the basics in Firefox, but I have never used Thunderbird.

beemarco
beemarco Question owner
more options

I tried both of these: renaming the file to match the .ini and copying over the entire %appdata/Mozilla/thunderbird folder. When I opened Thunderbird it had none of the old emails and was acting like a newly installed program.

Matt
Matt
  • Moderator
  • Top 10 Contributor
more options

Are you in appdata\roaming\thunderbird? If not that is the place to play

place the old profile in the profile folder. start Thunderbird with the profile manager using thunderbird -ProfileManager in the search box on windows 7 or Edit the shortcut on your desktop and add -ProfileManager on the end of the target. ie space -ProfileManager

Now tell it you want a new profile. Navigate to the profile you copied in. probably a folder name ending in default, select it and it should now be the profile of choice.

beemarco
beemarco Question owner
more options

There was no "Profile Manager" found using the search box. I tried it alone, appended to "Thunderbird", appended to "Mozilla Thunderbird". So this is not a solution unfortunately. Why is this program so obtuse that it is this difficult to restore from a backup!?!