Moving Thunderbird / Firefox profiles from Mint to MX Linux ... how?
 

Greetings everyone,

I'm trying to get my wife to move from Mint to MX in order to simplify working on both of our computers. Does anyone know of a decent, easy to understand "how to tutorial" in order to get this accomplished?

No matter how I try moving her Thunderbird / Firefox infos. over to the other system, I always end up with the new default profile which then doesn't contain the information that she wishes to continue working with. On MX it's a no-brainer, been doing that for several years now, but with Mint there appears to be some compatibility issues with version differences. I'm thinking that that may be the problem but I'm not 100% certain. The Mozilla Firefox tutorial that I looked at was either outdated or just couldn't be made to work as described on their site (for Windows users?).
Moving everything else works fine, just TB and FF appear to be a real PITA.
I'm looking for a relatively current tutorial (if there is such a thing).
Thanks.

I don't know of any good explanations of the mess that is in .mozilla folders - probably because the amount of time it takes to understand it is significantly longer than the time it takes to go insane from exposure to that monster.


The default profile is irrelevant - so long as they will accept the imported profile you can create a wrapper script that loads it with the new one.

If it doesn't accept the imported profile, it's probably due to a version difference.

You've neglected to mention the versions of OSes and applications involved, but probably it's because whatever Mint version you're using has a higher major version number for Firefox than whatever Firefox ESR comes with whatever MX you're using.

Alright, thanks. Not exactly a solution, but that answer has provided me with a couple of more things to hunt down with my buddy google. Perhaps there's a profile import / export extension? I'll see what I can find out and report back sometime soon.

Never had a problem with T/Bird - Windows to Mint, and for a while (later) back again. Just copy everything under the active (default ?) profile, and off you go. The doco used to have sections for both win and Linux, but looks like they don't give a damn for us anymore.
This looks like what I would have done, but for Mint. Must have worked because only my better half uses T/Bird, and if I'd messed that up, life wouldn't be worth living .... :p

Forgot to mention, this wasn't with current version - must look into that.

Thanks, I have quite a bit of experience with Linux and this issue is a little different because Mint is not set up the way that MX Linux is. Then there is also the version compatibility issue which tends to sneak up between the different distros. As stated already, backing up on MX is no problem and neither is on Windows. It's the migration specifically from Mint to MX Linux which is a problem in our case. Thanks anyway.

 

Running "firefox-esr --help" will reveal the option "--allow-downgrade" - though this option is not mentioned in the corresponding man page for firefox-esr.

There's a Mozilla Wiki page at https://wiki.mozilla.org/Firefox/CommandLineOptions which has it (but as a single-dash version):Searching the source code only mentions the double-dash version, but further searches to locate the CheckArg function has a comment stating "Flags may be in the form -arg or --arg (or /arg on win32)" - and the code confirms there's no difference: all three are equivalent (except the latter is only checked when compiled for Windows) - something that could easily be mentioned in both help and man pages, but isn't.

Shouldn't be a surprise - this is Mozilla, so why would one expect competency, consistency or basic attention to detail; they're too busy working on some shiny crap nobody wants.

LinWinux,

I used to run Thunderbird for many years but I got tired of having to go through the rigmarole of saving the old Profile folder etc when making a new OS installation.

The last time I did this I successfully followed the procedure in post #3 on:
https://www.linuxquestions.org/quest...08#post6221708

Assuming that you do not wish to save any existing emails, it is so much simpler to use a webmail client such as Proton Mail and transfer all your Contacts or Address Book to the new client.

The above Thunderbird Profile transfer problem just disappears when using webmail.

All you need to do is run Thunderbird.

Then click on “Address Book".

Select “Personal Address Book.”

Click on “Tools” and click on “Export”.

A window opens allowing you to choose where you want to save the exported file.

Save as type: Comma Separated (CSV).

Save it on your Desktop initially and then copy this file to an external drive.

On the new installation (or new computer), do the following:

Sign in to Proton Mail (or other webmail client) at mail.proton.me and select the Contacts icon from the side panel on the right.
1. Select Import contacts.
2. Copy the CSV file from the external drive and click on Import.
3. Your new contacts will now be encrypted and imported into Proton Contacts.

Thanks for all of the replies.
Working without Thunderbird is not an option at this point.
My wife has been using TB for the past 15+ years with archives and saved data spanning that entire time period. On top of that both of us also rely heavily on the Thunderbird Planner/Calendar function which has literally hundreds of important dates and events including reminders saved. So yeah, losing TB in lieu of something else would not be an option for us to pursue.
Ah well, I'll just keep working on it, eventually I'll get it figured out.