How do I back up and or save my email folders to a thumb drive?
I save all of my emails for particular jobs into folders in Thunderbird in order to keep them separate and easy to find. When I finish a job, I still like to keep the folders and emails for a year or two in case there are any problems. However, it gets kind of cumbersome dealing with the large number of folders. I would like to save those folders to a USB drive, and get them off of the computer to free up space, and make it easier to navigate through the remaining folders. Is there an easy way to copy the folder and all of the contents to a USB drive? I have tried the export option, and it is a bit cumbersome, and the result is all of the emails and attachments saved separately, with a naming system that makes no sense. It would be very difficult to find a specific email in there if I needed to. I am hoping that I can just copy the folder and it's contents in tact.
Any help would be appreciated!
All Replies (4)
Yes the issue of filing exported messages has always bugged me. You lose the threading, for one thing. And searching is troublesome.
I put old messages into Thunderbird's Archive, so they are out of sight but remain searchable. Of course, if disk space is your motivation, this doesn't help at all.
O.K., I am interested in that.... I have 464GB of free space remaining on my C: drive. How do you go about placing them in the archive? Also, when you do, do they stay in their individual folders? That would be VERY helpful.
Thanks
If you look at the attached image, you can see the folders I am referring to. I am truly hoping there is a way to just archive the folders and keep the messages inside them. That way, I can just go to the folder and find the message if I ever need to.
Thanks again
ok first some setting to check.
Right click the account in the folder pane and select settings
In the settings for the account (not local folders)select copies and folders Under message archiving select Archive options
Select keep existing folder structure of messages. In this case I would suggest Yearly archived folders as a single folder would be as bad as what you have now and monthly not much better as you would be chasing which month all the time.
now if I understand the process, it only works on mail, not folders. so select all the mail in a folder (ctrl+A) and then press A. All mail should disappear. The folder remains as a manual delete.
Looking in your newly created archive folder you should see a sub folder for the year containing sub folders with your mail in it. I just archived a 2007 mail and had a 2007 folder appear with all the necessary sub folders in it to drill down to where the archived mail came from.