I’ve blithely assumes that backups / snapshots of my home dir (including my Thunderbird profile) were covering my email. But it occurs to me it may be more difficult than expected.
I have message synchronization on for any folders I care about (“for offline use”). What I was assuming this meant was that if my mail host disappeared or mysteriously deleted an important folder, I would still be able to switch to a backup, start TB in offline mode (via a commandline parameter), and copy those folders to a local folder at which point I could reconnect and drag them back to my new host, a local imapd I use as an archive, or wherever.
But …would that actually work? Anyone recover email from offline folders? How’d that go?
I’ve backed up and transferred mail to other machines this way. Sibling comment is correct about testing your backup. Create a new user and copy the TB dir into the right place for the new user. Remember to change the permissions / ownership to that user. Launch TB and let it run off that folder to prove to yourself it works.
Source: IT
I’ve heard the notion that a backup you don’t regularly restore is mostly just theater. If you need to feel comfortable that you can restore your backups, then do that. You will need another machine to use, and then just go through the motions.
