Had TB Portable on my U3 drive... Wouldn't start up this morning. Uninstalled it. Reinstalled... Started it up, no emails / profile setup. Checked drive and can't find any of my previous emails / folders (2+ yrs of data)... Any tips on recovering this data?...
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It's been a long while since I've used the old U3 platform, but I'm pretty sure that uninstalling an application means you also delete all its data, so all of that data (your mail files) would be gone now. There is a slim chance you may be able to recover some individual mail files by using something like http://www.recuva.com/ or another recovery program. But the fact that you wrote new files to the drive after uninstalling (installing a new copy of Thunderbird) makes this less likely. It would at least be worth a shot, though. Don't use the drive for anything else until you try it.
Thunderbird, Firefox and OpenOffice.org for U3 have been unsupported for a very long time now, as is most software for the U3 platform at this point.
Sometimes, the impossible can become possible, if you're awesome!
lose or become corrupted? You had no backup of the TB Portable folder on a host machine? Did you have TB leave the messages on the server so you can at least have your new copy of TB pull the messages from the server? I have about 4 years worth of emails on my server still, so I'm covered if I lose all 10 copies of TB.
U3 didn't really make it easy to backup your data. There was no built-in backup utility and the only ones available cost US$20-30 or more. Plus, U3 buried the app data in directories like X:\System\Apps\3C9F7B3F-D55C-42cd-8537-B878518B73AF\Data\profile (that's the real Firefox for U3 profile directory) which made it hard to do it yourself. I noticed a lot of U3 users didn't back up way back when we supported it. That's one of the reasons why the PortableApps.com Platform has an easy-to-use (albeit simplistic) backup utility built right in.
Sometimes, the impossible can become possible, if you're awesome!