Archiving old Thunderbird email to an external drive

"I need to look up an old email message from 2010!"

If you migrated from Thunderbird and @scls.lib.wi.us email to Office 365, you may want to make a copy of your old Thunderbird email for archival purposes. 

SCLS will guarantee access to your Thunderbird email accounts on your PCs until January 2015. Starting in January 2015, SCLS PC Technicians will no longer copy Thunderbird email to new PCs. This means you will be responsible for archiving your Thunderbird email if you want to ensure access after January 2015.

Follow these instructions to back up your Thunderbird email to a USB drive: http://www.scls.info/technology/O365/ArchiveTBtoExternalStorage.pdf

Comments

[Alicia Fisher]

Is there any reason we couldn't save the old emails on our FileShare instead of a thumbdrive?

[Kerri]

The instructions are written for backing up TB to an external drive. Technically, you could back it up to a file share instead, but you'll need to make modifications to the shortcut paths accordingly. Because some Thunderbird accounts are very large, we were hoping to begin to retire them from the SCLS-supported PCs to help make data backup and restore go faster when PCs are replaced.

[Ignacia Boersma]

How much memory does the flash drive need to have?

[Kerri]

It depends on how large your Thunderbird profile is (how many years of email you have, how many attachments, etc). Thunderbird Portable is around 50MB installed. In the "Configure Mozilla Thunderbird, Portable Edition" portion of the instructions, you can right-click and choose "Properties" in step 5 (instead of right-clicking and choosing "Copy") and the proprties will tell you how large your Thunderbird profile is. Add the size of your profile to the size of Thunderbird Portable and that should give you an idea of how big your flash drive needs to be. Most folks don't need more than a GB or two.