Backing Up Mozilla's Thunderbird Email Program Is Fast And Easy With MozBackup

by Bonnie Boots

I’ve used MS Outlook for years, but a couple of months ago I found out the hard way that it has a fatal flaw or two. One morning I opened Outlook and the program froze. I couldn’t get to my email or my address book.

I didn’t panic. I’m a firm believer in backing up—and backing up that backup. I knew all my Outlook data was safely stored on both internal and external hard drives. But with Outlook frozen, I didn’t quite know what to do with that backup. So I turned to Google.

Two frustrating days later, I finally had email once again. Here’s what happened.

For starters, it turns out there’s a limit to how much mail you can store in Outlook. No one knows exactly what that limit is, because Microsoft won’t tell us. In fact, they deny Outlook has limits.

But I found about a zillion people on the internet with the same problem I had, so it’s easy to come to the conclusion that there are limits. When the limit is reached, the program stops working—without warning. Perhaps the limit seemed generous back in the 90’s when people only sent text emails. But today people routinely send and save emails filled with family photos and even movies, and the limits are more quickly reached.

When I learned this about Outlook, I decided to switch to Thunderbird, the free email program from Mozilla, the same people who give us the highly rated Firefox browser. 

Of course, the first thing I wanted to do with Thunderbird was import my email and addresses from Outlook. That’s when I discovered Outlook’s second big flaw—it doesn’t play well with others.

Outlook, it turns out, has its own proprietary format. Its data cannot be imported into any other email program.

If you’ve used other email programs, you probably know most of them use a similar format. That means you can import Eudora data into Thunderbird, and Thunderbird into Outlook. It had simply never occurred to be that you could NOT import Outlook data into Eudora or Thunderbird or anything other than Outlook.

So back I went to Google to spend many more frustrating hours looking for a fix. Needless to say, I paired Bill Gate’s name with many choice expletives before I finally found a workaround for getting Outlook data into Thunderbird.

Because I use and recommend Firefox, I expected I’d also like Thunderbird. I do. It’s easy to install, easy to use and has no limits on how many files it can hold.  It lacks only one feature—a built-in backup tool. But this was easily fixed with a fine bit of freeware named MozBackup.

MozBackup

MozBackup is a backup and restore utility for both Mozilla Firefox and Thunderbird. That is, it’s capable of backing up everything you have in Thunderbird, including your email messages and your contact lists.

It’s also capable of backing up your Firefox browser cache, something I’d never even considered before.

A restore wizard in MozBackup walks you though recovering lost data in the event of a system failure or even if you want to move your Firefox and Thunderbird info to new computer.

The first step in using MozBackup is to download and install the latest version. You’ll find it here on the MozBackup site:

http://www.mozbackup.org/

A wizard walks you though the installation and places this icon on your desktop.

Once MozBacup is installed, backing up your email or browser settings is quite simple. First, make sure Thunderbird is closed. Then click the MozBacup icon.

When you click on the icon, the program opens with this screen:

The next screen allows you to choose which operation you want to perform, backup or restore. It also allows you to choose which program you ant to act on, Mozilla Firefox or Mozilla Thunderbird. For the purpose of backing up your email, select “Backup a profile” and Mozilla Thunderbird.”

If you are the only person using email in Thunderbird, it's likely you only have one email profile, the default profile. In the screenshot below, you see that default is automatically listed. You need to click on “default” to select it.

If you share the use of Thunderbird with other people in your family, you may have more than one profile. In that case, you can repeat these steps for each profile to backup each user’s email.

At this time, you also choose where the backup will be stored. Use the “browse” button to navigate to the (hopefully) external drive you will use to store your email backup.

I strongly suggest that you DO NOT back up your email to your main internal drive. If your computer fails and your backup was on the hard drive, you will lose both the original mail file and your backup.

Note that in the screenshot below, I have chosen to backup to my F drive and NOT to my C drive, which is my main internal drive.

On the next screen you will select which details you want to backup. The details checked below are checked by default.  Unless there's some reason you don't want everything backed up, I suggest using the defaults.

MozBackup will also prompt you to password protect your backup. This is optional, but possibly a good idea for security reasons. Just be sure you use a password you will never, ever forget.

At the next screen MozBackup will backup your Thunderbird files to the directory you chose. Below, you can see it is almost done backing up my mail to my F drive.

Backup is FAST! It takes no more than a minute or two to protect your valuable mail and contact information. MozBackup will tell you when it has finished and show you a general report of what has been backed up.

There are just two additional points  to make about using MozBackup. First, if you keep tons of emails, sent items and attachments in your inbox, the backup file may be quite large. If storage space is an issue, here’s one way to reduce the file size. Open Thunderbird. Choose File > Compact Folders. When compacting of your files is complete, close Thunderbird before starting MozBackup.

Here’s another thing to consider. MozBackup does not currently have a way to schedule backups. This means you need to be sure to backup regularly.

If you get mail infrequently, once a month may be often enough. If you get a lot of email, you may want to backup Thunderbird once a week. If your email is critical to your business, you may want to make email backup the first thing you do each morning.

It takes a mere minute…and just imagine how bad your day would start off if you lost your email and addresses!

P.S. A reader recently wrote to say she'd followed the tutorial and backed up her email, but had some questions.

"First, I couldn't locate the file on my external drive.  I had to use the Windows "Search" to find it. When I found it, I clicked on it, but windows said it couldn't open it. How do I get it open to make sure my emails are in there? And if you can only open it in Thunderbird, then what happens if Thunderbird crashes, or my computer crashes. How would I get to my saved emails?"

This reader is making a common mistake--thinking of the backup file as if it was a Word document, one she could open and read like a text file.

But the backup file is NOT text-based. It's a database, not readable by humans until they open it in the appropriate software. Here's how I explained it:

The file you create with MozBackup is a backup of a "mail client database." It can only be opened by a mail client. Think of it like an Excel spreadsheet, which is also a database. You can only open an Excel file and read the data byusing Excel.

You can import the file you created with MozBackup into Thunderbird or almost any other mail client.  (The exception Outlook. Microsoft purposely makes it difficult to open files created in other mail clients. It's not impossible, but it is difficult.)

After creating the backup, you can check your drive and SEE that the file is there, but you can't, for instance, open it like a Word doc and read all the names and email addresses.

If you don't like where the MozBackup file is being stored by default, just create a folder in My Documents, and the next time you backup, direct the program to save the file in the folder you created.

In the event you did not have access to your computer for any reason, you would have to install Thunderbird on any other computer and import that backup.

I've already had to do this once. My desktop crashed, so I installed Thunderbird on my laptop. I was shaking it my shoes, worried my email would be screwed up. But once the data base was imported, I opened Thunderbird and everything looked the same as usual.

It's similar to having a Word doc on a computer that crashed. If you installed that version of Word on any other computer, you could import and open your Word docs. In this case, the only difference is that you're working with a data base rather than a text document.
 

 
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