Backup mess-up. Help Please.

[DoubtingT]

Hi,

I mistakenly restored my home folder using Back In Time (I thought I was
clicking on a downwards options arrow button to see the snapshots available, but
it was actually attached to the Restore box next door, which whizzed into
action without any warning messages or confirmation dialogue). Okay, I'm an
idiot - but it won't happen again.

The upshot is that my home folder has gone back in time by three days. This
isn't a tragedy as the only changes during that period were to e-mails and
web history.

I'm using Thunderbird, which was clever enough to make back-ups of its own.
As a result, I haven't actually lost anything, but I now have two of everything
and additional files too.

e.g.

Inbox - 3 days out of date

Inbox.backup - up to date

Inbox.msf.backup

popstate.dat.backup

Obviously the Inbox.backup contains the last three days of e-mails. Can I
simply move them back to the original Inbox and delete the backups (including
.msf and .dat as they would no longer be necessary) or is there some other
procedure I need to go through? At the moment, the Thunderbird sidebar is
cluttered with all these extra folders and hovering the cursor over them causes
a square black blob to materialise underneath.

I could do another restore to a more recent Thunderbird snapshot (from 4 a.m.
today), but I don't know what effect this would have (I'd be layering a restore
on top of a previous restore) and I'd still have to move manually the mails
since that time.

I really don't want to make Thunderbird any more unhappy than it already is.

I'd much appreciate any help you can give on this.

Thanks.

[djennings]

If your sidebar shows both sets of folders why not simply drag and drop the latest mails from one folder to another?

[DoubtingT]

Thanks for looking in.

Yes, I've already done that. In fact, it was only necessary to make manual changes for sent mails as the remaining downloadable mails were still on the server and simply downloaded themselves again.

There's no problem with missing data. The problem is that the backups have effectively doubled the size of the profile folder from about 4.5 to 9 GB. When I tried to do a selective restore to a later snapshot, Thunderbird warned me that I was restoring a profile that was older than the one already in existence, and that it would therefore create backups of the more recent folders to rest alongside the restored ones. Obviously this is what happened when Back In Time went into action.

Not casting aspertions, but the downward arrow on the restore function in Back In Time looks for all the world like a selector arrow...

I think I'm going to make another backup of the profile and then experiment with simply deleting folders, which is an option Thunderbird gives. The reason I've asked for advice is because I'm wary about the size of the folders; Thunderbird Help seems to offer warnings that if you go over a certain size data can become corrupted and it isn't truly gone until the compaction process takes place.

If I'm successful, I'll mark this thread as solved.

Anyway, thanks again for looking in.