How to Migrate to Thunderbird Portable

I've been keeping my life on Flash storage since around 2004. I started off using an old SD card in a cheap USB reader as a lightweight method of carrying my daybook and notes between work and home. Over the years 600 web pages of technical notes, my personal journal, plans and action lists migrated to a series of ever larger replacement thumb drives. Today nearly everything I work on lives on a single 8 GByte Sandisk drive.

As the drives have got larger I've slowly migrated to a portable software environment running off the same thumb drive, so that whether at a work PC, with a notebook on the train, or one of the bigger laptops at home I have consistent access to applications and data. Most of the thirty applications I regularly use come from PortableApps.com with a smattering of others configured with the help of PortableFreeware.com.

PortableApps.com recently released a new version of Thunderbird Portable and given my son's assertion that playing The Sims is rather more mission critical than my e-mail it seemed clear that now was a good time to move that last application off of the family laptop and onto the thumb drive. However with an archive of more that 16,000 e-mails I was somewhat concerned at how straightforward that would be.

Like all downloads from PortableApps.com installing Thunderbird Portable 2.0.0.18 was easy, just double click, point it at the correct drive and stand well back. Once installed, I started Thunderbird from the PortableApps menu (well the geek.menu fork, truth be told) and went through its initial set up, supplying dummy data when prompted. Delving around on the thumb drive then revealed that Thunderbird had created a folder of profile information at:

E:\PortableApps\Thunderbird Portable\Data\profile\

This folder is easily identified as it contains 'Mail' and 'extensions' sub-folders and a variety of ini, dat, rdf, js and db files.

Going back to my original Thunderbird installation the profile data was in the default:

C:\Documents and Settings\frog\Application Data\Thunderbird\Profiles\xxxxxxxx.default

folder (where xxxxxxxx is a random string of characters that, no doubt, hashes my password, inside leg measurement and all my credit card numbers.) Deleting the contents of the profile folder on the thumb drive, I copied the contents of the old

C:\Documents and Settings\frog\Application Data\Thunderbird\Profiles\xxxxxxxx.default

into the now empty

E:\PortableApps\Thunderbird Portable\Data\profile\

ignoring the fact that the two pathnames are structured rather differently.

Starting Thunderbird Portable appeared to work correctly, with all the old messages and folders appearing. However the status line seemed to indicate it was struggling to open a particular message. Exiting Thunderbird, which probably caused it to rewrite its config data, and restarting it solved the problem.

In total it took about ten minutes to move 16,000 archived messages, folder structures, and account settings to the thumb drive. Despite the difference in folder path structure it worked first time and I was impressed by how smoothly Thunderbird handled the change in profile.