Important folder and subfolders suddenly missing, help!

[love10001212]

Strangest thing just happened - need some assistance.

Use Zoho with Thunderbird with 2 accounts and normally have no problem

Suddenly just now - one huge folder with about 15 subfolders is totally gone. Not just labels, the actual emails. I log into Zoho from the web and gone there too. Normally am only using Thunderbird on a laptop, pc, and the email client on two iphones.

Go onto my laptop and disconnect wifi - the folder is there as it used to be. Backed up with mozbackup, saved the entire profile folder, and now am saving each folder one by one to a hard drive

What is the easiest way to get the entire folder and subfolders back onto thunderbird/zoho with what I am doing? Am I missing an easier step?

Last - how and why does this happen so I can prevent it from happening again?

Thanks!

[love10001212]

Update - I have the saved.sbd folder/s and msf files and all look like normal (large) sizes when compared to the second zoho account with similar amounts of mail

I tried replacing those folders/files into the profile folder of the desktop with the active wifi connection, opened TB again but the saved folder did not come back. I tried making a new empty saved folder and doing that again but no luck

It seems they are saved in the correct files, but are not being displayed and are not searchable. Is this even possible?

[DanRaisch]

How is the account set up in Thunderbird, as POP or IMAP? Find out using menu path Tools->Account Settings->Server Settings->Server Type at the top right of the dialogue.

[love10001212]

IMAP

I spent 2 hours trying to direct the path - no luck. I would point it to the correct folder (server settings - local directory) and while it works for to the other zoho account as usual, for this account, it would not show up even though it points to the correct corresponding folder with the files I moved from my other computer (saved.sbd)

At points, I would restart TB and the folders WOULD start to show up right away for a few seconds, then it seemed as if they were being overridden by other settings somewhere and all disappeared.

So I have the files saved for that entire folder and sub folder, but there does not seem to be a way to copy them to the "server" to make them stick - I can't even import them to zoho (they only let you import one file at a time, no folders)

[love10001212]

Now, on a totally different account (gmail, imap)- that saved folder is duplicating itself into the trash folder. so I have the regular saved, and a second identical saved in trash. I see it loading all the emails right now.

Not sure if this is related

[tanstaafl]

See http://kb.mozillazine.org/Importing_folders . You'll have to import the folders into "Local Folders" or a POP account, and then move them to the Zoho IMAP account. A Mozbackup backup is just a renamed .zip file - you can rename it from *.pcv to *.zip, unzip it and then import any mbox files you want.

Its tough to suggest what you can do to prevent this from occurring again without knowing why the parent folder was deleted. Make certain your AV is set to quarantine, rather than just delete infected messages. Its possible you accidentally deleted the parent folder using an iPhone, so when Thunderbird synch'd your accounts folders it deleted it too.

[love10001212]

Thanks, will attempt that.

I don't expand that folder on my iphone so it wasn't from there, and hadn't gone into that section (bottom of a lot of other folders above it) in some time so I can't imagine how it got removed.

Since I'm not having strange folder issues (duplicating, moving itself into trash etc) is there any way to continually save a current profile (vs manually doing it) just in case something happens and I'm not able to recover like I was this time? Or is there an undo/restore old kind of thing (sort of like the restore old set from lastpass?)

Thanks!

[tanstaafl]

http://kb.mozillazine.org/Profile_backup
http://kb.mozillazine.org/Third_party_p ... d_services

The ImportExportTools add-on has a option (select it in tools -> add-ons and press its options button) to schedule backups of the entire profile. Its nothing fancy but works fine and is pretty straightforward. I used it for a while. Since it doesn't zip/compress the backups and I expected if I needed a backup it would be due to a recent disaster I told it to backup to the same directory each time.

You could also use a normal backup program (not Thunderbird aware) that backups the profile, and run automatically using the windows task scheduler. There are plenty of freeware programs such as Syncback that would do that (see second link).

http://kb.mozillazine.org/Synchronizing ... _computers has links to some programs that you could also use for backup, that are designed to sync a copy of a directory with the contents of the original directory. They're smarter, and only copy whats changed.