283585 - Function to backup ALL address books

Status: NEW

(MailNews Core :: Address Book, enhancement)

Description

[石庭豐 (Seak, Teng-Fong)]

User-Agent:       Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 5.1; en-US; rv:1.7.5) Gecko/20041107 Firefox/1.0
Build Identifier: Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 5.1; en-US; rv:1.7.5) Gecko/20041107 Firefox/1.0

Right now in Tools menu of Address book, we've got Import and Export functions.
 Very nice.  However, each one of them applies only to one address book.  It
would be great if there's a function to backup ALL address books.  And the
counterpart function, restore, could recreate non-existant address books if needed.

Another problem with import/export is that when one imports an ldif file whose
name is different from "Personal Address Book", a new address book is created. 
For some, this might be a good point, but for others, this might be a hassle.

For the restore function, more considerations have to be taken.  For example,
what to do if an entry exists already?  Maybe Thunderbird could popup a window
to show both entries and let the user choose between them.

Reproducible: Always

Comment 1

[Wayne Mery (:wsmwk)]

workaround - try http://kb.mozillazine.org/MozBackup aka http://mozbackup.jasnapaka.com/

Comment 2

[Mark Banner (:standard8)]

RFE isn't necessary, enhancement severity is good enough, please don't use RFE.

Comment 3

[石庭豐 (Seak, Teng-Fong)]

OK.
But I used RFE because in other wishes that I made (severity is enhancement too), people always corrected my titles and added "RFE".  That's why I added the word RFE.

Comment 4

[石庭豐 (Seak, Teng-Fong)]

(In reply to comment #1)
> workaround - try http://kb.mozillazine.org/MozBackup aka
> http://mozbackup.jasnapaka.com/

I've just tried this MozBackup (oh yeah, more than 4 years after its suggestion! :D)
Indeed, it could backup all address books and restore them (though I haven't checked if it backup and restore every attribute).  Very well done.

However, for users on platforms other than Windows, they're less lucky.  So this enhancement request should be maintained here.