I have both a .thunderbird and a .mozilla-thunderbird from an existing installation.
I installed Thunderbird 3.0b3 under Fedora 11, but it doesn't seem to see the email in either of those directories.
How can I restore my old settings and email?
You should be able to simply drop them into your home directory.
example:
cp -r /media/USBStick/backup/.thunderbird ~
cp -r /media/USBStick/backup/.mozilla-thunderbird ~
make sure your applications also have sufficient read permissions to these files.
I always used cp --archive SOURCE TARGET/
to duplicate folder trees. The --archive option does everything as --recursive --no-dereference --preserve=all
. Where --preserve=all includes mode, ownership, timestamps, context, links, and xattr.
There are too many soft links and ownership and permission details that a straight cp -r
does not accomplish.
Basically the same as Saint DanBert, but I usually use tar.