Multi boot 20.04 and Neon causing a Thunderbird problem

[Teunis]

(Maybe I should have posted this in a forum about applications)

Since a couple of months I am running Neon and it generally works for me.
Regretfully the installation of Neon made 17.10 disappear from the grub menu and I could not get it back.
I wanted to continue using Kubuntu and installed 20.04 in the old 17.10 partitions.

Since many years I keep both Firefox (.mozilla) and Thunderbird (.thunderbird) on one of the two Kubuntu home partitions and link them to the other, this has always worked flawlessly and at the moment they are on the Neon /home.
(By the way, the .thunderbird directory holds all my mail since 1997 and is about 23 GiB in size)

After the successful installation of 20.04 with Thunderbird and Firefox and linking to the relevant Neon directories I returned to Neon and upon starting Thunderbird I got an error.


Through 'More information' I came on a website explaining the perceived problem:
https://support.mozilla.org/nl/kb/un...ersion-profile

It tells me about changes to the version 68 behaviour that no longer allow the sharing of profiles, apparently that's how the system sees my linking between partitions.

But so far I've not found a way to get back to using the same 'data base' for both installs.

[Don B. Cilly]

I remember the same thing when I copied my neon /home to 20.04.
I had to trial-and error the subfolder names.
Can't remember exactly how I did it, but, a listing of my neon ~/.thunderbird should give you the necessary clues to matching the ".default-release-" folder names:

~/.thunderbird$ ll
total 44
drwx------  8 not not 4096 Dec  1 19:32  ./
drwxr-xr-x 46 not not 4096 Jan 18 11:33  ../
drwx------  7 not not 4096 Dec  1 19:24  1vnz26eh.default-release-1.bak/
drwx------  2 not not 4096 Jan 16 17:56  53kazbft.default/
drwx------  4 not not 4096 Jan 16 18:59 'Crash Reports'/
-rw-------  1 not not  132 Dec  1 19:31  .directory
-rw-rw-r--  1 not not  190 Dec  1 19:29  installs.ini
drwx------  2 not not 4096 Dec  1 17:25 'Pending Pings'/
-rw-rw-r--  1 not not  561 Dec  1 19:29  profiles.ini
drwx------ 10 not not 4096 Jan 18 12:16  tr602myr.default-release-2/
drwx------  7 not not 4096 Dec  1 19:29  tr602myr.default-release-2.bak/

[Teunis]

In the mean time (last night) I got a similar problem with Firefox, version 72.0.1 refuses to work with the .mozilla profile I shared between the two /home partitions.

After removing Firefox I copied a backup of end November and reinstalled Firefox, this brought back access.
Regretfully the backup dit not have certain changed passwords but by copying the key3.db and key4.db files from the no longer accessible .mozilla profile all came back.

It looks like it is no longer possible to share those directories over multiple installs and at the moment the only option I see is to use the Firefox Sync but I wonder how secure this is.

Still struggling with Thunderbird...
Next I will try to put back the November backup and reinstall Thunderbird.

Because I still use pops for mail I would lose send mail in case I made two separate installs. Additionally I want to get access to my old mail,