Help to find my address book on hard drive from computer that died
My Win 10 XPS 8920 stopped working. I pulled hard drive and it is OK. I have a new Dell xps 8940 SE and put Tbird on it but am not able to find my files from the old surviving hd which I put into an external enclosure. It looks like somehow the old profile got overwritten by the new install or something.
I am on tbird 91 latest release on both the dead computer and new one.
I find a abook.mab.bak history.mab.bak and impab.mab.bak and impab.mab.bak files from Sep 2020 which have a good bit of data in them, but the computer died late Jan 2022. So I'd like to find if there is another profile somewhere.
Que 1: Is there a way to see data in the .bak files? Notepad ++ perhaps? Que 2: I may have moved file to a location for my Crashplan backups to be able to include. How might I find it on the drive?
Thanks for any advice, tips, ideas in advance. Much appreciated. Blessings, Kelly
Chosen solution
sfhowes THANK YOU... this made me realize that I forgot the change from .mab to .sqlite and so I was a bit baffled. Finally found the "rest of the story" / files under the previous profile which is no longer under the Tbird folder in Roaming... it is under the old profile name which for some reason my search was not finding despite showing hidden files.
I'm going to give it a go and will update shortly.
May need to know more about whether I need to upload all the old .mab files and some of the other sqlite related items. I'm going to go slowly and see what I get and will be very happy to regain dozens of year's of addresses. Whew!
Blesssings, Kelly
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On the old drive, the TB profile folder would have been in
C:\Users\username\AppData\Roaming\Thunderbird\Profiles\xxxxxxxx.profilename
AppData is hidden by default. Look for abook.sqlite (Personal Address Book) and history.sqlite (Collected Addresses) and copy them into the new profile folder, overwriting the existing files, with TB closed. Otherwise, the .mab files can be imported in 91 from Tools/Import...Address Books...Mork database...select a .mab file. Just delete the .bak extension.
Chosen Solution
sfhowes THANK YOU... this made me realize that I forgot the change from .mab to .sqlite and so I was a bit baffled. Finally found the "rest of the story" / files under the previous profile which is no longer under the Tbird folder in Roaming... it is under the old profile name which for some reason my search was not finding despite showing hidden files.
I'm going to give it a go and will update shortly.
May need to know more about whether I need to upload all the old .mab files and some of the other sqlite related items. I'm going to go slowly and see what I get and will be very happy to regain dozens of year's of addresses. Whew!
Blesssings, Kelly