Re: [Hampshire] Moving Thunderbird

Paul Stimpson wrote:
> Hi,
>
> I just installed Kubuntu Intrepid on my spare hard drive. I'm trying to move all my Thunderbird mailboxes and settings over from FC10. I copied the .thunderbird directory over by dragging it onto my Truecrypt-encrypted external drive then booted the Kubuntu drive and dragged the thunderbird directory into my home. I'm sure this is what I've done successfully in the past.
>
> This time Thunderbird opens with the create account wizard and totally fails to acknowledge the contents of the .thunderbird directory. I've checked the ownership is right. Can anyone give me a hint as to what has gone wrong?
>
We've had this before, and last time people came up with all sorts of
ways of fooling thunderbird/firefox to use copied directories by
renaming (though it turned out the problem last time was that the
copied files were owned by root!)

The easiest way to fix this is to start either program with the
"-profilemanager" argument - that comes up with a dialogue which allows
you to create a profile and, importantly, allows you to select an
existing directory as the location for the profile. You then make the
new profile your default, so thatit is used next time you start the
program normally.

I used this on Windows to move my profiles to under My Documents
(instead of under Application Data) so that I could back it up more
easily. I've also used it to put my data onto a disk shared between
Windows and Ubuntu on a dual boot machine (though that got confused when
trying to use add-ons in both OSes).

Simon