I have used TBird for many years and have thousands of emails that are not on a server. It’s taking up 227 GB on my new computer, about half my hard drive. I don’t want to lose those emails, so I need to see if the email file can be permanently put on my external drive and deleted from C:// to save that drive from filling up.
Is this possible and, if so, can someone tell me how to do it?
Thank you!
Paul
Hey @Paul_Wiseman, this forum is for Voice-AI dataset creation project, which is called Common Voice, as explained here.
You can get TB help here.
But, while you are here, let me tell you what I do (I have many attached email accounts):
- I regularly use the “archive” feature to move stuff under archive directory, which has sub directories as years (2020, 2021, 2022 etc). I don’t archive ongoing conversations of course…
- Every new year, I go to the e-mail directories, compress older years (I use 7zip) and save them to my backup drive, also deleting the directory contents.
- So if you think you would not regularly need 2022 or older emails, you can archive, 7zip and backup them - but keep 2023 for example.
- If you need to reach such emails, just expand back them under archive.
I keep the backups like:
/backup
/thunderbird
/mydomain.com
/myname@mydomain.com
2022.7z
2021.7z
Two more points:
- While creating the accounts, you can change the drive/directory. I never use
C:\for my data, but use a data drive (spinning HDD). I would like to format system drive (Windows) once in a while, or it is not safe to keep data there anyway. - As you are using Windows, you can also use the “compact” command to keep the TB data compacted, text compacts very well. I use the CompactGUI for this purpose.
In my opinion, using an external drive for live data is not a good idea. They tend to fall due to Newtonian dynamics and you can lose everything.
Hope this helps…
Thanks for all this!! I indeed wondered if this was the right forum, but it’s what came up… And I’ll definitely keep your ideas in mind!!!
Paul
1 Like