Migrate Thunderbird from 15.1

I just made a clean install of LEAP 15.2 on a separate partition and want to migrate my LEAP 15.1 Thunderbid configurations. Now I could copy my entire home .thunderbird directory with five separate accounts but I am sure there ia a lot of accumulated garbage that I would prefer to leave behind. What are the necessary files I need to move? Internet searches seem to only refer to the Windows methods.

Thanks in advance

As far as I know, everything important is in “.thunderbird” (a directory) under your home directory.

If the old place is on a mounted disk, you can probably just use a symbolic link. Otherwise you would need to do a recursive copy.

I did a very similar migration last year, at the time these were the files that were not needed:

paul@HP255G7:~/.thunderbird/Profiles/<name>/redundant> ls -lh
total 2.6M
-rw-r--r-- 1 paul users 512K Oct 29  2014 blist.sqlite
-rw-r--r-- 1 paul users 509K Jul 28  2018 blocklist-addons.json
-rw-r--r-- 1 paul users  28K Jul 27  2017 blocklist-gfx.json
-rw-r--r-- 1 paul users 136K May 12  2018 blocklist-plugins.json
-rw-r--r-- 1 paul users 112K May 12  2018 cert8.db
-rw-r--r-- 1 paul users  96K Jul 14  2017 downloads.sqlite
-rw-r--r-- 1 paul users 448K Aug 11  2014 extensions.sqlite
-rw-r--r-- 1 paul users 321K Aug 11  2014 extensions.sqlite-journal
-rw-r--r-- 1 paul users 192K May 15  2014 formhistory.sqlite
-rw-r--r-- 1 paul users  16K May 12  2018 key3.db
-rw-r--r-- 1 paul users  78K Jul 26  2017 localstore.rdf
-rw-r--r-- 1 paul users  364 Feb 16  2013 mailViews.dat
-rw-r--r-- 1 paul users 3.5K Aug 19  2015 mimeTypes.rdf
-rw-r--r-- 1 paul users  17K Mar  9  2016 search.json
-rw-r--r-- 1 paul users  16K May 14  2014 secmod.db
-rw-r--r-- 1 paul users  15K Jul 26  2017 signons.sqlite
-rw-r--r-- 1 paul users  96K May 14  2014 storage.sdb
-rw-r--r-- 1 paul users   25 Jul 26  2017 times.json
paul@HP255G7:~/.thunderbird/Profiles/<name>/redundant> 

There are also some sub-directories in your profile directory you could remove completely, they will be recreated as needed:

crashes
datareporting
saved-telemetry-pings

Initially I moved, rather than deleted them, as they took up such a small space I later decided to just leave them.

Since then there may be be other files that are redundant, a good indication is the last access date, although that’s not always reliable.

Thank you Tannington, that cleaned up a lot.

Assuming a separate home partition, what I do is install the new OS on it’s own partition without mounting home, Test the new OS until I’s satisfied then simply mount the old home. This is the main plus for having separate home partition rather then the “new” way of having all on one partition under BTRFS. You can remove the test home by booting in safe mode and removing the contents of /home that is on the root partition.