$ 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.gzOK 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 .thunderbirdIT 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