MX Linux Forum

In my opinion it is not a good practice to keep highly personal data like the thunderbird profile in any system partition.
Keeping it in a separate data partition (ntfs, in case one wants to share it with windows installations), all that has to be done is:

-copying/moving the profile to an appropriate folder in the data partition (only done once at the very beginning of this configuration)
-editing the paths in the profiles.ini of the particular OS and setting the path-is-relative parameter to "0".

And eventually to tell TB to shut up about "older versions.." by adding --allow-downgrade* as start parameter.
Works here for 14+ years with the same profile.. .
Further advantage: Gets regularly backed-up with the general data backups.

*which does not actually downgrade anything. Just makes TB accept older profiles, as far as I can see..

thanks all, so far. I understand that I can just as well move to the latest TB ver in MXPI, so as to have whatever new features it offers (something re encryption, I understand) and won't have problems--except somehow regarding my user profile, some way as concerns "sharing". But I do not intend to share anything with anyone and I have only MX as OS on my old rig. So is there anything else to worry about? I would like to be able to backup my TB--both profile and mail folders, when I back up my data folder. Do not understand how to do this. Any advice/comments/explanations would be much appreciated. I regard this as still within this thread. thanks.

Friedrich gave the solution:

-copying/moving the profile to an appropriate folder in the data partition (only done once at the very beginning of this configuration)
-editing the paths in the profiles.ini of the particular OS and setting the path-is-relative parameter to "0".

The section from my profiles.ini is: