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Address Book

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  • Last reply by DaveN190

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A few days ago, I exported a profile backup to a USB drive from an up-to-date version of Thunderbird - Using Windows 10. I then replaced the motherboard, processor and memory. Fitted a new ssd drive and reconnected the old ssd drive.

After performing a clean install of Windows 11 and a fresh up-to-date Thunderbird install, on what is effectively a new computer, I logged into my email accounts. Everything worked well, except:

I have lost my contacts - the address book is empty. All attempts to import the back-up files failed. All attempts to replace the a.book.sqlite and history.sqlite files using Windows file explorer (while Thunderbird was closed) failed.

Can you help?

Thanks in advance, Dave.

A few days ago, I exported a profile backup to a USB drive from an up-to-date version of Thunderbird - Using Windows 10. I then replaced the motherboard, processor and memory. Fitted a new ssd drive and reconnected the old ssd drive. After performing a clean install of Windows 11 and a fresh up-to-date Thunderbird install, on what is effectively a new computer, I logged into my email accounts. Everything worked well, except: I have lost my contacts - the address book is empty. All attempts to import the back-up files failed. All attempts to replace the a.book.sqlite and history.sqlite files using Windows file explorer (while Thunderbird was closed) failed. Can you help? Thanks in advance, Dave.

All Replies (3)

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try tools>import>import from a file>addressbook

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The import utility does not appear to work. The address book files (abook.sqlite and history.sqlite, plus .shm and .wal variations) do not appear to move over. They do not appear to be empty - all contain 32KB except the .wal variants which contain 417KB. When imported back, they are definitely empty!

Is this something to do with the back-ups (exporting) were created using Windows 10, but the importing these files is done in Windows 11 ? Trying to import the profiles exhibits the same behaviour.

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Hi David, Thanks for your reply. Unfortunately, that did not help. I have tried all the usual ways of doing this, but no success so far! I have even tried deleting all the profiles created (except the backup on USB stick), uninstalling and re-installing Thunderbird. Then I copied the individual files in the backed-up profile to the newly generated "profile" folder, so that the files in that folder were overwritten. This restored all the old folders and emails in them, but did not transfer any email addresses. Help please?? Kind regards, Dave.