Closed Bug 1248706 Opened 8 years ago Closed 8 years ago

Profiles cannot be opened after latest update

Categories

(Thunderbird :: Untriaged, defect)

38 Branch
defect
Not set
normal

Tracking

(Not tracked)

RESOLVED INCOMPLETE

People

(Reporter: mchiavegatti, Unassigned)

Details

User Agent: Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 10.0; WOW64) AppleWebKit/537.36 (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/48.0.2564.109 Safari/537.36

Steps to reproduce:

I have createe new email profiles each year to avoid a single giant email data base of many GB to be managed by Thunderbird. Therefore, I have several existing profiles in the PROFILE MANAGER since 2007.
I frequently access old profiles for searching my historic data.



Actual results:

I can access the PROFILE MANAGER as usual but when I choose one of the existing profiles it no longer opens its database like it used to. That happened after the last update to version 38.6.0
It now opens a blank HOME folder for my emails when an older profile is selected like if a completely new and empty profile was being created.
It works OK though for the current profile being used (for this year) but I can no longer access the data for the old ones although they are still there in the following path:
C:\Users\USERNAME\AppData\Roaming\Thunderbird\Profiles


Expected results:

I should be able to open each profile independently and see its contained data through the profile manager or through the following commands:
-  Thunderbird.exe -ProfileManager
-  Thunderbird.exe -P "PROFILE NAME" -no-remote
Being able to seamlessly open eight year old profiles is not something that we support. We did changes in Thunderbird 38 that would break pre-TB17 profiles.
But the previous profile being used in 2015 contains data until Dec.31,2015.  Therefore it is actually only a couple of months old and not a 7 year old profile. It should be automatically compatible with the latest version should it not ?
Everything was working fine until this last update which does not recognize files for any other existing profile besides the one being used during the updating process.
Because the update does not recognize the existing profiles, I have also tried to create a new profile and pasting the data from an older profile to the just created folder for the new profile but that data was not recognized either when opening the new profile.
Really your best option is to keep an older version of Thunderbird available, say Thunderbird 24, to use to look at old folders.

But I am talking about folders made in Thunderbird versions earlier than 17. You are correct that profiles used in more recent version should not have the issue, so perhaps you are seeing something else.
I think all my files were actually saved under versions later than 17. Although some of them might have been created a long time ago they were actually saved under newer versions.
Anyway, what would be important to me is to actually be able to at least see the profiles created within a couple of years ago.
I have not changed my procedures to open those older profiles. As I said before I have always being able to access them by the PROFILE MANAGER without any problems.
After the latest update I can still use the same PROFILE MANAGER where the existing profiles names can be seen. However, when I select any of those I get a page as if creating a new data base for the profile with new email account option, etc.. I could send you a screen shot if that was possible. But I do not think it is in this thread.
If you tell me how I can restore the older version or where I can get the version prior to 38.6.0 I could possibly install that version and test it. I am quite sure I would not have that issue if I was able to revert to the previous version.
After some research at MozzillaZine I found the problem at:
 C:\Users\USERNAME\AppData\Roaming\Thunderbird\Profiles\PROFILENAME
It was caused by the file PREFS.JS for some of the profiles.
There were several renamed files in each profile like prefs-1.JS, prefs-2.JS, etc. The default file PREFS.JS being read by TB was the last one created after the TB update on Feb.16 when it got corrupted.
I replaced that earliest date file by one with a later date such as PREFS-3.JS and BINGO !!!
When the selected profile was chosen all my messages were recovered accordingly.
The awkward thing is that bug did not happen to all my profiles. Just for the ones named from 2011 to 2015. The profiles between 2007 and 2010 could be opened as usual although they also contained more than one PREFS.JS file.
Hope that info can be helpful.
TKS for your support. Regards.
Status: UNCONFIRMED → RESOLVED
Closed: 8 years ago
Resolution: --- → INCOMPLETE
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