If you are using Mozilla Thunderbird for your email in Windows 10 or 11, and you have installed Thunderbird from the Microsoft Store, you may want to look at this article.
I spent about three hours on Saturday trying to find the location of Thunderbird's data files on Nancy's laptop, after I realized that the files in the default location were out-of-date and not being updated. This made no sense as Thunderbird was running perfectly. It also meant that I did not have a current backup of her email, as I had just been putting the standard location in my Free FileSync program and assuming everything was OK.
It turns out that if you install from the Microsoft Store, it puts the data files in a non-standard location. Instead of being in
C:\Users\username\AppData\Roaming\Thunderbird
they are in
C:\Users\username\AppData\Local\packages\MozillaThunderbird.MZLA_h5892qc0xkpca\LocalCache\Roaming\Thunderbird
(I think that the .MZLA_h5892qc0xkpca portion of the directory name may vary by machine).
It's been 18 months since I set up Thunderbird on her laptop. I remember having trouble getting it to find the files from the previous PC, which I had copied to the default location. I'm not sure how I got it running in the first place, but I did get the mail from our desktop PC into Thunderbird. I made the mistaken assumption that they were now in the standard profile location, and those were the ones I was backing up.
Incidentally, in this situation, Thunderbird will give you an error message if you try to open the Profiles directory in Help > Troubleshooting Information > Profiles Folder. The error message does show the correct path of the Profiles directory, but it won't open it.
Looking at the AppData\Local\Packages directory containing the Thunderbird files leads me to suspect Windows is using this directory for other programs as well.
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