I’ve moved my Firefox profile to my NAS some time ago and it runs smoothly.
It’s quite convenient, as I only need to adapt the profiles.ini and it works.
Now I’m looking to do the same with Thunderbird. A preliminary search showed, that this might not be a good idea. I’ve already tried it, and it did seem to work, only the size of the profile folder (~7GB) is a hindrance, as it takes some time to load/start. So I need help solving these questions:
Can or should I move it to my NAS?
If it can be done, I need to ‘shrink’ it. Not sure how to do it best. I’m moved older mails into separate folders, so I could move them out of the profile and still have them available if I need them.
Should I move away from Thunderbird? It has been my mail client for more than 15 years. It’s easy to move from one installation to another. It’s not perfect (filters…), but it does it’s job. But I haven’t found a good alternative.
Not shrinking, but optimizing. NFS for example is good when it comes to a lot of small files and if your downloaded mails are saved as *.eml files instead of *.mbox files it should work more fluently. It is not possible to shrink it except deleting mails or compress them (and yes thunderbird supports it), but it is just a small benefit.
Never change a running system.
So in general the problem here lies on network protocol and offered bandwidth.
My folder is about 500MB and a folder from another user is 1,5GB.
I move my importand mails to local folders, created by thunderbird. So my mailboxes are rather emty.
The local folders are in the .thunderbird folder too, so it works fine with the symlink. When I move .thunderbird to somewhere, all folders are included.
An option that could work, is to have a “default” profile, with everything from, say, a year ago, and keep that local. And then an “archive” profile that’s kept on the NAS, that doesn’t have to be as fast…or just split the emails into smaller profiles.
rename the local .thunderbird - for example .thunderbird-original
create the symlink to your NAS - .thunderbird
Now you can test it.
If it dosen´t work for you, easily delete or rename the local symlink and rename back your .thunderbird-original to .thunderbird.
Important:
either you work with local .thunderbird or with symlink-NAS! When you get an email and you work with the NAS, then it is saved in the NAS folder. But when you swich between NAS an Local, then it could happen, one mail is in the local .thunderbird and another is in the NAS - .thunderbird. I is not synchron!
If you sometimes want use the local .thunderbird, then you have to move your NAS .thunderbird to your local folder and later, if you want to use the NAS, move it to them and create the symlink again.
for me it works since many years without problems -)
Okay, the easiest solution for me: I’ve bought an additional SSD (128GB) which will hold my Firefox and Thunderbird profiles and “local downloads”, like videos I want to work on, or pictures. Cost was around 10€.
Both applications will have a daily backup using Deja-Dup.
Anybody knows if Timeshift also makes snapshots of another drive?
I’ll still need to archive old stuff within Thunderbird, but this gives me some room to breath.
I don’t really know what you mean by this, but if your partition is mounted Timeshift can backup to it easily. I do it like that. It can also backup it, but since the disk is new, I’m presuming that’s not it.
My first drive (e.g. sda1) is the one running with Manjaro (btrfs). If I still a new drive (e.g.sdb1), format it as btrfs and auto mount it on startup, will Timeshift take a snapshot of that drive too?
Essentially, it’s not necessary, as only the profile is there and should not be changed in any shape or form during an update.
Right there is where my knowledge ends. I know BTRFS is special and uses its own tools for just about everything, if not everything. I don’t know anything more. Rather start a new thread so that it gets more…exposure. Or at least to someone who knows more.
-)