Permanently Move My Thunderbird storage to External Drive

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…