All my calendar data is gone
I've been using thunderbird for quite sometime now, at least a year. This morning I opened thunderbird, and was greeted with a dialog box asking me to set up an email address. Rather confused, I closed the dialog box, hoping my emails and other data would still be there. But thunderbird remained blank, checked my calendar (which I relay on quite a lot for scheduling my day to day), empty as well, all my calendars were gone.
The data stored in my calendar is of much importance, I spent a lot of time looking online for assistance, however nothing I tried fixed the problem. It seems the majority of issues related to missing calendar data revolves around the extension Lightning disappearing or failing to update properly, for me this doesn't appear to be the case. I did attempt to remove Lightning and reinstall it, this didn't fix the issue.
A user profile was found in AppData/Roaming/Thunderbird/Profiles. Little was found in way of calendar data. In calendar-data folder two files were found: deleted.sqlite (96Kb) and local.sqlite(1568Kb). In the root directory: storage.sdb (96Kb) contains no references to previous calendar data, nor does storage.sqlite(1kb).
System information: Windows 7 64 bit Thunderbird is version 60.9.0 (32 bit), up to date. Lightning is version 6.2.9
No crash reports, however the power went out last night due to a thunder storm. The computer would have shutdown abruptly, plus thunderbird was open when this event occurred.
Some help in retrieving the data, if possible, would very much appreciated. The data information I have in my calendar is of great importance, and a major setback for me if lost.
Thanks for your help.
Wšykne wótegrona (3)
The power outage no doubt caused TB to suffer the common problem of losing track of the profile location.
http://kb.mozillazine.org/Recovering_a_profile_that_suddenly_disappeared
Thanks for the reply, sfhowes, I followed many of the methods in the first link you provided.
Using profile manager to move the profile; Creating a new profile and copying/importing the data; Modifying the profiles.ini, these all failed. I even attempted the instructions under “Nothing you do works”, this failed as well.
Attempting to repair corrupted prefs.js, first I determined the file is corrupt as the string “mail.account” wasn’t found. No backed up versions were found, such as: prefs-1.js or prefs.bak. No version could be recovered through CHKDSK. So repairing prefs.js doesn’t appear to be possible.
To mitigate this kind of problem in the future, create regular backups that are easy to restore: copy the Thunderbird folder to a backup location. Its default location (hidden by default) in Windows is:
C:\Users\<winusername>\AppData\Roaming\Thunderbird
Restoration is as simple as replacing a corrupted Thunderbird folder with the backup.
I suggest you create a new profile with Profile Manager and add your main account. To start PM, close TB, Windows key+R, type
thunderbird.exe -p
Copy the calendar data from the old profile to the same location in the new profile (while TB is closed). The rest of your address books, mail etc. can be transferred from the old profile if necessary.