recover thunderbird profiles on ext3

[Sebastian]

hi all,

I just wasted my evening on trying to recover my deleted Thunderbird profiles.

What happened? I was flicking back and forth between a backup and my
home folder with gnome commander, I wanted to delete the old backup
(have in on disc) but ... wrong folder and gone where my and my
girlfriends profiles.

I shut down and gave my knoppix DVD a spin but could not come up with
much... except testdisk which ended with an error message.

As I did not find a simple recovery procedure for my profile files I
came across two windows based ext2/3 recovery solutions.
rlinux [http://www.data-recovery-software.net/Linux_Recovery.shtml]
http://www.diskinternals.com/linux-recovery/
and I had a try with http://www.cgsecurity.org/wiki/PhotoRec

PhotoRec found lots of files on my home partition. the file names
where all jumbled. I was able to recover lots, Firefox cached html and
pictures and I found some thunderbird mbox files.

rlinux could not recover anything or maybe I was not smart enough... :-\

With linux-recovery I saw all my thunderbird profile files and folders
anfter a scan. Unfortunate all hat file size 0 so no point in
recovering.

What are your experiences with file recovery under linux (ext3)


I then decided to use my backup files. They are one month old so the
loss is not to tragic and I thought once I start Thunderbird the mail
will be downloaded again. Unfortunately this is not what happened.

Is there a way to download them again? Most of the mailboxes are pop3.
can I set something in a file or manipulate the mailbox to download
again? Or is that server based handled?

As one of the accounts is a gmail account I could switch pop support
off and start downloading all mail again... but this would mean to
download 3 years of mail again with only one month missing... not an
option.


Any thought?


By the way, not my Thunderbird complains about not being able to save
messages an draft or send messages, do I need special file
permissions?