Misterium Macrium

You can mount the backup image and have a look for what you want. That is the usual procedure with all imaging programs that I know of.

Somewhere in the ui will be a mount image option, then browse to image file. Or maybe there is a rt click context menu on the image file.

Bree said:

When Macrium is installed on the PC the default action for double-clicking on a .mrimg file is to mount it, then browse with Explorer to find and copy the files you want. If you have a backup set of a Full image and a series of differentials or incrementals, then double-click on the one for the date of the backup you wish to explore. You can tick the box for 'enable access to restricted folders' to avoid any permissions issues when browsing the backup.

To the three nice enough to reply, and without in the slightest trying to be smug or whatever, I know how to do that. What I don't know is how to, for example, choose a specific file or folder from, in my instance, a Thunderbird entry on the G drive, the one chosen by Macrium. It is at that point that I don't know how to proceed; I can see a few folders, and I believe that I figured out earlier how to find the others, but I have not figured out how to then tell Macrium to, for example, restore the "PJ" folder.

Curiously, given that I am looking at this afternoon's interim backup, that folder shows no change since last February, but does indicate a much larger content than it did before the interim backup ran. This is all part of what I am finding confusing, which is not something that I need help with....

Rename your current "%AppData%\Roaming\Thunderbird" folder to something like Thunderbird-10-05-21

Then copy the Users\yourusername\appdata\roaming\thunderbird folder from the mounted image into your current %AppData%\Roaming folder.

Not Myself said:

I discovered today that I have several folders and subfolders in Thunderbird that have lost their contents At least one of the folders, which only had two entries, had them on 2May2021..

It's possible the data is there but only it's index ( <foldername>.msf ) file has gotten corrupted

Usually all you need to do is close Thunderbird, delete that <foldername>.msf file and restart Thunderbird where upon not finding the index, Thunderbird will just rebuild it.

If you feel more comfortable, there's a 'Repair Folder' Option built into Thunderbird covered here that does the same thing. :

How to repair a Mozilla Thunderbird folder?

If that doesn't restore the missing contents then I'm guessing you don't want to restore your entire ../Roaming/AppData/Thunderbird/Profiles/xyx123.profile from before May 2nd because while getting these missing files you'll end up loosing whatever email you've done between now and then.

If so, you CAN restore individual folders, i.e. just these ones you're missing email from by mounting the Macrium back up as a file system dated when you know the missing email was there, and then by following the procedures in the same blog here:


Restore Lost Folder in Mozilla Thunderbird



There's also a very good outline of how email data is stored in Thunderbird folders here:


Where are message folders stored in Thunderbird?

Farvatten said:

It's possible the data is there but only it's index ( <foldername>.msf ) file has gotten corrupted

Usually all you need to do is close Thunderbird, delete that <foldername>.msf file and restart Thunderbird where upon not finding the index, Thunderbird will just rebuild it.

If you feel more comfortable, there's a 'Repair Folder' Option built into Thunderbird covered here that does the same thing. :

How to repair a Mozilla Thunderbird folder?

If that doesn't restore the missing contents then I'm guessing you don't want to restore your entire ../Roaming/AppData/Thunderbird/Profiles/xyx123.profile from before May 2nd because while getting these missing files you'll end up loosing whatever email you've done between now and then.

If so, you CAN restore individual folders, i.e. just these ones you're missing email from by mounting the Macrium back up as a file system dated when you know the missing email was there, and then by following the procedures in the same blog here:


Restore Lost Folder in Mozilla Thunderbird

Neither Repair Folder nor removing *.msf files have any effect. I will deal with the rest of your message and the ones just before this later today, with my thanks for all. (Now the forum says that my message is too short, needs to be at least three characters long!)

There's also a very good outline of how email data is stored in Thunderbird folders here:


Where are message folders stored in Thunderbird?

Neither Repair Folder nor removal of *.msf files has any effect. I shall deal with the rest of this message, as well as those directly above it later today, with my thanks.

Not Myself said:

Neither Repair Folder nor removal of *.msf files has any effect. I shall deal with the rest of this message, as well as those directly above it later today, with my thanks.

Reading this other link I mentioned, I see it's more about a 'Missing Folder' not missing contents, so there's much there that's unnecessary.

If you understand how Thunderbird stores folder data and more importantly where, it can really be as simple as finding that folders 'MBOX' file, the file with the same name as the your folder but WITHOUT an extension, at which point you just replace it with the one you culled from your mounted Macrium backup. Then remove it's corresponding *.msf file, so when you start Thunderbird it can rebuild the index with these new contents.

Of course having a recent Macrium backup as your fall back option is important.