Forum Discussion

wjeffrey's avatar
wjeffrey
New Contributor
5 months ago

Thunderbird after Cox-to-Yahoo transition - retrieving address book after T-bird down-version

Thunderbird recently did an automatic update to V115 for me. I was in the middle of the Cox-to-Yahoo flog, and the update seemed to cause some problems, so I downloaded T-bird V102 and reverted to it. The re-install warned me that it might muck up my profile, and it did. Today I see only a very short address book – about 10 addresses that have been collected in the last few days. The only thing I would really like to retrieve is my previous address book.

This morning, I fired up T-bird, hit the Hamburger > Help > Troubleshooting > Profile > Open. It opened a profile called
C:\Users\...\AppData\Local\Thunderbird\Profiles\eskwfzbf.default-release-1.
    A search revealed that there is another Thunderbird profile folder called
C:\Users\...\AppData\Roaming\Thunderbird\Profiles\eskwfzbf.default-release-1.
    These two folders have the same Create Dates and Modify Dates, but the Roaming one is considerably bigger – 2.8 GB vs 1.1 GB.

An exhaustive search uncovers no other Thunderbird Profile folders. So my first question is – what is the difference between the Local and Roaming folders? And does the "–Release-1" ending part of the name have any significance for my task?

More info if needed:
The \Roaming\ version of the Profile folder contains  three subfolders
    eskwfzbf.default-release-1 (225 MB)
    ib2tlmhy.default - (47 bytes)
    v52htabf.default-release (2.6 GB)
The \Local\ version of the Profile folder contains  three subfolders
    eskwfzbf.default-release-1 (125 MB)
|    ib2tlmhy.default - (0 bytes)
    v52htabf.default-release (1.0 GB
Note the size differences.

And finally, the \Roaming\ version of the \esk...release-1\ sub-folder contains 3 ABOOK files
    abook.sqlite - 256 Kbytes
    abook.sqlite-shm - 32 KB
    abook.sqlited-wal - 0 bytes
On the other hand, the \Local\ version of the \esk...release-1\ sub-folder does not contain any ABOOK files.

From all of this, I am concluding that the address book I am looking for is probably the abook.sqlite 256Kbyte file in the roaming version of the profile folder. However, when I open any of the abook files with Notepad, I don't see anything that looks like a bunch of addresses. I don't expect Notepad to show me any organized or formatted result – but shouldn't I see some text that resembles addresses?

What is next? During the Cox-to-Yahoo transition, I made a number of changes to email accounts and passwords. They are now set up the way I want them, and I DO NOT WANT TO UNDO any of those changes. But I think I should be good if I simply copy today's \Roaming\Profile into today's \Local\ folder. Confirm?

Thanks - Bill

 

No RepliesBe the first to reply