Address books empty after installing 91.2.0

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ThomasHedden
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Joined: October 22nd, 2021, 6:14 am

Address books empty after installing 91.2.0

Post by ThomasHedden »

My wife is using Thunderbird on the Windows 10 platform. She had been using an older version of Thunderbird for which the automatic upgrade feature no longer worked. (She doesn't remember the exact version, but it was pretty old.) She recently downloaded and installed 91.2.0 to perform the upgrade manually. After the upgrade, all her address books were empty. I checked her home directory, and there is only one profile in the default location. She does not recall being asked any questions during the installation about her existing profile. She does not recall having used any extensions or doing anything unusual. I could not find any files with the *.BAK extension or any obvious old versions in her profile. Did the location for the address books change? Are the address books still there? Is there some obvious place to look for them or way to recover them? Any help or suggestions would be appreciated.
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LIMPET235
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Joined: October 19th, 2007, 1:53 am
Location: The South Coast of N.S.W. Oz.

Re: Address books empty after installing 91.2.0

Post by LIMPET235 »

This is better off in the Support forum.
Moving it there...
[Ancient Amateur Astronomer.]
Win-10-H/64 bit/500G SSD/16 Gig Ram/450Watt PSU/350WattUPS/Firefox-115.0.2/T-bird-115.3.2./SnagIt-v10.0.1/MWP-7.12.125.

(Always choose the "Custom" Install.)
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tanstaafl
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Re: Address books empty after installing 91.2.0

Post by tanstaafl »

Version 78 switched to using sqlite databases for the address books. It backed up the existing *.mab files (abook.mab is your main address book) using .bak file extensions and imported the data into the sqlite file.

If Thunderbird can't find a sqlite version of the address book normally it will automatically migrate the data from the *.mab file.

Try exiting Thunderbird, deleting abook.sqlite* (The '*' is important as there are three file extensions used) , copy and then rename the .bak files to be *.mab files, and start Thunderbird again. See if it will import the *.mab files. Make certain you don't just rename the *.bak files as you want to preserve the backups in case things go wrong.

If that doesn't help one workaround would be to install a older version of Thunderbird in a different directory, create a new profile, copy the *.mab files there and if they have the data you want export the address books from the address book windows tools menu as .csv or .ldif files. You can then import them using version 91, for its profile.

I suggest you use the en-us 64-bit version 60.9.1 setup program for thunderbird at http://ftp.mozilla.org/pub/thunderbird/ ... n64/en-US/ to export the *.mab files.

http://kb.mozillazine.org/Go_back_to_an ... hunderbird
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