Transferring Thunderbird settings - SOLVED

[WHVW]

Hi

I'm in the process of making a new install on a larger drive, and transferring files over. What are the files I need to transfer so that Thunderbird will work?
(It doesn't seem to like a mass transfer of all the stuff in the ".thunderbird" file.)

Thanks.

[Cosmo.]

At first close TB completely.
Now compress the hidden folder .thunderbird. Transfer the compressed file to the new system and unpack it.

[WHVW]

C'est la solution!

Thanks, Cosmo; That did it.

It took a couple of tries, it seems you should compress the file in the folder you will open it up in, rather than compress it where it is, copy it and uncompress where you want it to be. I did get an error doing it that way, but when I compressed it to the destination folder, it worked fine.

Thanks again.

[Sgthawker]

At first close TB completely.
Now compress the hidden folder .thunderbird. Transfer the compressed file to the new system and unpack it.

Is compression suggested for any particular reason?

I just copy the .thunderbird folder from one install to another, or copy to a USB stick and copy to another computer with no perceptible issues.

[Cosmo.]

it seems you should compress the file in the folder you will open it up in, rather than compress it where it is, copy it and uncompress where you want it to be. I did get an error doing it that way

Without telling the error message I cannot say anything about it. I compress it inside of the home folder and it works fine.

Is compression suggested for any particular reason?

No, not necessarily. After reading in the starting point about problems with "mass transfer" I gave the advice to compress to avoid this problem and avoid wasting time with investigating in the reported problems. I personally use this method, because I need the TB-profile here and then in one of my test systems in a virtual machine and by copying the .thunderbird folder at first into a shared folder for this virtual machine and from there to the home of the virtual test machine it gives some problems with permissions (resulting from the fact, that for the shared folder VirtualBox uses a special file system).

[WHVW]

Cosmo & Sgthawker:

To clarify: I did try to do a straight A>B copy, but TB rejected it. Perhaps it was just a glitch, but it was consistent through a couple of attempts.
The error, as I recall, was a rather generic "unable to copy file" sort of thing.
Now, oddly enough, the compression technique doesn't want to work for "Play On Linux" files.

Later folks