Backup and Restore Thunderbird - Linux

Backup and Restore Thunderbird Profiles and Mail in Linux Based Systems The Profile and Locally Saved Mailboxes are usually in a hidden directory within the user home directory.

$ ls -la ~ |grep -i thunder
lrwxrwxrwx   1 o    o        20 2011-05-01 21:54 .mozilla-thunderbird -> /home/g/.thunderbird
drwx------   5 o    o      4096 2013-01-26 03:10 .thunderbird

.mozilla-thunderbird is just a link, I need the .thunderbird directory

Let 's see how big it is

$ du -h --max-depth=1 .thunderbird/
28K .thunderbird/signature
341M .thunderbird/o-mailbox
3.1G .thunderbird/bi6vfzcd.default
3.4G .thunderbird/

Too big, I better create a compressed archive

Create the compressed archive

$ tar czvf thunderbird.`date +%s`.backup.tar.gz ~/.thunderbird

Wait ... done!

$ du -h thunderbird.1*
1.6G thunderbird.1395816237.backup.tar.gz

OK compression and relatively fast ... I will save the archive to another medium for backup and the copy it to another GNU-Linux System to test the Restore Process In my case the 'from' system is a ubuntu 10.4 with thunderbird 3.1.15 and the 'to' system is a Debian wheezy with thunderbird 24.

I do not have any email settings in the debian system so I will just replace the .thunderbird directory with the one in my archive

$tar xzvf thunderbird.1395816237.backup.tar.gz;mv thunderbird.1395816237.backup.tar.gz .thunderbird

IT DID NOT WORK ... searching for thunderbird 3.1.15 ( http://ipduh.com/search/?q=download%20thunderbird%203.1.15 ) click on Security http://www.mozilla.org/security/announce/2011/mfsa2011-40.html a few minor security issues we know off not in the mozilla site ... I better get it off the Ubuntu System than some other site ...

In the Ubuntu System thunderbird 3.1.15 is at /usr/lib/thunderbird-3.1.15

In the Debian System

$su
Password:
# rm /opt/thunderbird/ -r
# mv thunderbird-3.1.15/ /opt/
# rm /usr/bin/thunderbird
# ln -s /opt/thunderbird-3.1.15/thunderbird /usr/bin/thunderbird