I had ThunderbirdPortable.exe etc on Drive d:\MyApps\Thunderbird and moved it to C:\MyApps\Thunderbird (new SSD).
The old ThunderbirdPortable.ini entry was "ProfileDirectory=..\..\MyAppData\Tb\Profile" . Readme.txt says:
The ThunderbirdDirectory, ProfileDirectory, PluginsDirectory and SettingsDirectory entries
should be set to the *relative* path to the directories containing Thunderbird.exe, your
profile, your plugins, etc. from the current directory. All must be a subdirectory (or
multiple subdirectories) of the directory containing ThunderbirdPortable.exe. The
default entries for these are described in the installation section above.
Neither in Readme.txt or online I could find if it is impossible to point to a a now different drive and Directory for the Profile in ThunderbirdPortable.ini . "entries should be" sounds like there is a possibility? I tried various combinations like "d:\", "d:\\", "d:/", "d://"
[ThunderbirdPortable]
ProfileDirectory=d:\MyAppData\Tb\Profile
RegistryDirectory=Data\registry
SettingsDirectory=Data\settings
AllowMultipleInstances=true
None did work, Tb created a subdir MyAppData\Tb\Profile.
So it seems when the directory is not on the same drive this is not easily supported?
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Portable apps are designed to be self contained within a single directory. Pointing it to another drive is not supported.
Sometimes, the impossible can become possible, if you're awesome!
Ok thx. Probably years ago when I was setting up the profile on d:\ I already had to discover this, but maybe forgot. I also have Custom Tb folders in different d:\ locations - they are split by main topics so I can backup them together with other stuff of the same topic.
But for settings or migrations this complicates things.
So I need to change my plan to save App and Profile data on two different drives (one performance, one Data/Backup) - or change to normal install if that allows a Profile on custom drives.
It looks like in your case scenario it would be easier for you to use a shortcut for launching thunderbird.exe with a desired custom profile.
In the Target field of the so-called desktop shortcut, the line needs to follow the below schema:
"full path to thunderbird.exe" -profile "full path to profile folder"
Quotes " " are optional if there are no spaces, and on my system Windows even removes them for the first segment.
This way you can use any thunderbird.exe app folder combined with any custom profile folder.
Thankyou @MiK for this suggestion. Do you mean the thunderbird.exe in the ThunderbirdPortable\App\thunderbird\ directory or a normally installed Thunderbird?
You can use any folder containing thunderbird.exe from any existing installation, portable or regular. You can also get it without installing anything by downloading full exe installer from Mozilla archive, and extracting from it the "core" folder, using 7-Zip.
Only, in case of using some old profiles or maybe just older, you would rather need to use with them compatible versions of the program.
Talking about old versions, if you use a Thunderbird version older than 68 (using here info for Firefox as a basis), for launching multiple instances you would need to add the -no-remote argument to the command line, something like this:
"full path to thunderbird.exe" -no-remote -profile "full path to profile folder"
This is equivalent to the AllowMultipleInstances=true line in the ThunderbirdPortable.ini file.
If you have any further questions, please feel free to ask.
Thank you very much. Will try to play with it.
A word of precaution in case you would use old profiles with newer versions of Thunderbird, just play it safe, experiment with profiles copies. I don't know about Thunderbird, but you must have heard it too about Firefox updates messing with users' profiles.
And, regarding updates, the forced ones, again dependent on the Thunderbird version, and if you would like to disable it, you will need to handle this by yourself with a policies.json file.
Good luck with the testing.