I am getting too many file errors on my USB thumbdrive when accessing T'bird Portable on my Win7 64bit machine.
* I always use "Safely Remove Hardware"
* There are almost always 1 or 2 file errors after dismount.
* File errors are mostly in the Address book, but not always.
* The last one wiped the profile and even restoring the "Data" directory did not get it back, I needed to re-install T'bird Portable.
* USB Drive is Kingston 32 Gig with FAT32 file system.
* Running the same USB on WinXP 32bit works just fine, never any file problems.
I can not keep using this, either I need a different USB device, although this is the second one I tried, the first one was worse, or I need to find a different Portable Version of T'bird or other email client that will work.
Anybody have any recommendations or possible fixes for me?
TIA
R~
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It's not Thunderbird Portable causing the issue. Software can't do that (unless it is capable of crashing Windows' USB driver, which this isn't). The issue is hardware-related. Since this is your second device, it could very well be an issue with the USB port. A flaky USB port will short occasionally and cause errors on the drive.
Sometimes, the impossible can become possible, if you're awesome!
It may not be T'bird, however:
* There are many other apps on the drive and non of their files ever got corrupted.
... These include Open Office with dozens of Word processing, pdf and spreadsheet edits going on.
* Toucon with backups made after each Windows 7 session. (This "may" be partly to blame.)
I have re-formatted the 32G Kingston USB drive using NTFS and have not had a problem since, more than a week.
My conclusion is that there "IS" a problem using Thunderbird Portable on a 32G USB drive that is formatted FAT32 and running it on Windows 7 Pro, 64bit. All of my testing points to this.
I have found an acceptable 'work around' so I am not going to pursue it farther.
Thank you for all of your work with this.
R~
NTFS handles errors better than FAT32 and will mask some of the issues you are having. But the underlying cause is still there somewhere. And it's not Thunderbird Portable. There are no issues running TBP in conjunction with Windows 7 x64 (which is my primary OS) nor a 32GB drive (which I also have).
Sometimes, the impossible can become possible, if you're awesome!
I have TBP on a fat32 formatted 32GB flash drive, run it daily, extensively, with multiple mail accounts, hundreds of megabytes of stored email, tens to hundreds of new emails a day, and it has never had any corrupt files on the device.
The reason you are always seeing thunderbird files corrupted is most likely that it is making hundreds more writes to disk than any other app you run. It is very strongly based on databases, with sqlite for many functions, and also the email database format that they use for every mailbox, so any change you make, even as simple as marking a mail as read, will involve updating a large number of files to reflect the mail, its state, the ui state, the index files, etc.
This means that if the hardware is bordeline failing, then this sort of stress is most likely to tip the balance into a corrupted write.
An addition to what John said (although this problem I'm talking about would normally show both on XP as well as Win 7)...
How big is your Data folder of TBP? More accurately, is any of the files in there bigger than 4GB (4GiB)? That would cause issues, as FAT file-system doesn't support files with sizes from 4GB (4GiB) upwards. And that exact problem would have been mitigated by using NTFS file-system...
If that were the case, I can't see any reason why it wouldn't cause problems on XP as well, but the mere mentioning of FAT vs. NTFS in this thread makes a hint to this possibility. Just throwing ideas
My posts are old and likely no longer relevant.