Address book disappeared

[Giollicoop]

Yesterday suddenly I open thunderbird and I discovered all the adress books under
"collected adres books" is not visible.
Moreover when I type some adress in a new email the automatic typing does not work for the adress are not in the
"personal adres book".
So it seems I lost dozen of adres books.
Why?
What to do?
I checked in the profile files and I dont see any adress book visible
I tried to close and open, to disactivate add ons... but nothing!
Please help me
Roberto

[DanRaisch]

I checked in the profile files and I dont see any adress book visible

Address books exist on the hard drive as files with the extension .mab. The Collected Address book is stored as file named history.mab. Have you confirmed that that file is not present?

[Giollicoop]

history.mab still exists
I use Linux Mint

[DanRaisch]

It sounds as though the file history.mab may have become corrupted. See if this article is helpful -- https://ubuntuforums.org/showthread.php?t=1397060

[Giollicoop]

Ok
I am not so expert to do that nut I try to backup first the profile and then to use terminal writing what he suggested, using history.mab
instead of abook.mab
thanks

[Giollicoop]

sorry
I am not so used to use php
may you suggest me how to start?
I open terminal and...