Thunderbird - Backup

It seems not very important, but once you loose your appreciated mail history you can be far away from running your business. All of you contacts, appointments etc can be captured in a certain way in your mail archives.
It is therefor very important to make on a regular basis a copy of your thunderbird data so that you can restore it if required.

I have not run into any problem with other problems than Windows yet, so the information is restricted to this environment.

Backing up the data

The procedural steps are very simple:

• go to the directory where the profiles are stored
  The directory can be found (in a standard installation) in \users\\AppData\Roaming\Thunderbird
  The directory named users will seem to be named differently on dutch systems. Using the users directory works however.
• Copy the content of this entire directory
• Paste it on a safe location

How to restore your mails and other data?

Running into this problem after a migration from Vista to Windows 7 I found this article which refers  this tool at this site.
The software - which is a Thunderbird add-on - makes it possible to import thunderbird data of any kind back into the existing thunderbird environment.
Tested the software ... and it worked for importing the folders from a backup set of the thunderbird profile.