Transferring Thunderbird/Firefox profile to MAC OSX Lion

A novice user of 11.6 " Mac Book Air and a survivor of couple hard drive crashes on Toshiba Portege, i was faced with the challenge to migrate all my emails, profile settings etc from Windows 7 to Mac OSX Lion. Tried several websites and no help. Thought of trying something and it worked like a charm..


So if you are struggling to transfer your mail account settings and locally stored emails from Win thunderbird to Mac thunderbird, below is the step by step guide.

1. Thunderbird installed on Mac OS, installs in the following directory - /Users//Library/Thunderbird/profiles. If you want to explore the directory, try MAC + SHIFT + G and type in the complete path. Finder doesn't show certain directories.
2. This is where the thunderbird profile is stored. Copy the profile from the windows machine and paste it in the profiles folder on MAC.
3. Rename the existing folder to profile.orig and change the new profile you copied to the profile name created by thunderbird which you just renamed above without the .orig.
4. Go to thunderbird in offline mode and all your account settings etc will be available in MAC.
5. Now you can change the local folder to the folder where you wanna store the downloaded emails by going to Tools -> Account Settings --> Local Folder or you can keep the existing one. Close thunderbird.
6. Copy all the locally stored email files from windows machine over to the local folder identified in step 5.
7. Restart thunderbird in offline mode and you will have all your emails available for viewing.
8. You can restart in online mode and start using thunderbird for managing your emails.

You can follow the same profile copy approach for firefox. So far i am happy with Safari as my preferred browser but if you have VMWare for WIN7 you can use the same approach to copy the profiles and you will have the entire data set with saved passwords etc.

How to Fix "Itunes cannot read the contents of the iphone"

You might be faced with this situation at times when you have a jailbroken iPhone/iPod Touch. You might have played around with some CYDIA apps, most notably the apps which try to modify the contents of iTunes Database File. One of those apps is MewSeek which lets you add the songs to the iTunes library directly from your iPhone/iPod Touch. Well sometimes it corrupts the following two files iTunesDB and iTunesCDB.

You will get the following message on iTunes “Itunes cannot read the contents of the iphone. Go to the summary tab in IPhone preferences and click restore to restore this iphone to factory settings”.

If you didn’t Jailbreak and you are in this situation, you have no choice but to do a full system restore on your iDevice and rely on a backup. But if you have jailbroken your iDevice, you can use iPhoneBrowser or iFunBox to explore the contents and fix it yourself without doing a restore. You might have to copy your songs/ringtones/videos back again but you still have everything else. The Songs etc are there on the device its just that the DB files are corrupted. So using iPhoneBrowser or iFunBox navigate to the following directory

/var/mobile/Media/iTunes_Control

Now within the above directory you will find two more directories

Music

Under Music, delete the following directory - itunes_db_checked

iTunes

Under iTunes, delete the following two files - iTunesDB and iTunesCDB

Disconnect the iDevice and reconnect. iTunes will detect it fine and you may or may not have your media. Try the option below which might help with just reusing the backed up DB files. You can also use iPhoneBackupExtractor to get the same DB files and see if they help.

FYI - You may try copying the iTunesDB and iTunesCDB from tmp folder back to iTunes directory to see if your songs/ringtones/videos come back

This is all you need to get your iDevice back in shape without a restore.