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Recover from a Thunderbird problem after disk clone Apps
After using carbon copy cloner to copy my system to a different disk, I found that thunderbird was no longer working. It started up, but the menus were incomplete and inoperative and needless to say, I couldn't read or send mail. After some trial and error involving the Profiles folder and various files therein, I finally determined that the following sequence restored my previous mail settings with no loss of information:
  1. Rename existing ~/Library/Thunderbird folder
  2. Start thunderbird, cancel out of the account setup process
  3. Quit thunderbird
  4. Make a copy of ~/Library/Thunderbird folder
  5. Copy all of ~/Library/Thunderbird.renamed/Profiles/default to ~/Library/Thunderbird/Profiles/default
  6. Copy ~/Library/Thunderbird.bu/Profiles/default/XUL.mfasl to ~/Library/Thunderbird/Profiles/default
The key is the XUL.mfasl file. It is a binary file, and a cursory examination using strings(1) didn't provide any obvious clues as to the cause of the problem.

Note: substitute your active profile name if not using default.
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Recover from a Thunderbird problem after disk clone
Authored by: glowrocks on Mar 20, '04 04:51:31PM

I tried to follow my own tip today, and it didn't quite work.

What I did instead was to create the empty thunderbird profile as described, and then went into the backup and copied only the files that had been modified since being installed.



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