Archive vs Local Folders

[PhishStory]

Greetings, fellow Tbirders!

In times past, I backed up my emails for inactive/dormant addresses on my NAS. Now that I have a new machine, I would like to restore them for historical access and reference, but I can't recall if I used the native Tbird 'Archive' option, or if I manually created folders on my NAS and copied messages for each email account to them. Is there a way to tell either way?

I can access the NAS folder in question and see MSF and DAT files in there dating back to 2020. Just looking to restore access via Tbird on the new machine, and back up emails that have accumulated since then.

Thanks in advance!

[tanstaafl]

The main way to tell if you used the archive command is to look at the folder hierarchy. If they're all lumped in one folder you probably did it manually instead of using the archive command. Whichever method you used the only differences should be what folder hierarchy you used.

Personally, I'm biased towards lumping them all together on one folder.

I'm puzzled by the reference to .dat files. You normally see mbox files (which store the messages for a folder and don't have a file extension, for example "inbox." for the inbox folder) and *.msf files (basically a folder listing). If you had a .dat file attachment I'd expect it to be stored within the mbox file (which is named after the folder), not separately as a .dat file.

[PhishStory]

The main way to tell if you used the archive command is to look at the folder hierarchy. If they're all lumped in one folder you probably did it manually instead of using the archive command. Whichever method you used the only differences should be what folder hierarchy you used.

Personally, I'm biased towards lumping them all together on one folder.

I'm puzzled by the reference to .dat files. You normally see mbox files (which store the messages for a folder and don't have a file extension, for example "inbox." for the inbox folder) and *.msf files (basically a folder listing). If you had a .dat file attachment I'd expect it to be stored within the mbox file (which is named after the folder), not separately as a .dat file.

Agreed, using the native utility and keeping each address in its own folder structure is what I'd prefer. Not sure why I didn't do that in the first place, other than not understanding the implications at the time.

The trick now is that I have 'backup' folders in different locations on my NAS. Unfortunately I can't add images at the moment to illustrate.Here are a few screen shots. I'd like to see if I can start 'fresh' by renaming the current 'archive' folder as 'archive-old', create a new one, point to it via my tbird installation(s) - laptop and desktops, and then restore the folders and emails to it. Is that possible?

[tanstaafl]

Sure.

[PhishStory]

Sure.

Sounds good. Once I have the new archive destination set up on my NAS, how would I go about restoring precious emails from other accounts? I have a couple locations on my NAS from prior attempts to back up my various email accounts, no doubt using different methods. Here's what a couple of them look like. I'd be grateful for a pointer on how to recover as much as I can.

This seems to be what I tried to do using the native 'archive' settings that I plan to delete and start fresh, since there doesn't seem to be anytthing in there and it's not organized in a sensible way - IOW, one folder per address.


Then I have this structure in a different location, looks to be from a manual drag/drop operation:

[PhishStory]

Having some trouble understanding how to point to my new archive destination. Can someone please help?

Thanks!!!