How to restore missing calendar data from Lightning/Thunderbird

Question

Today out of nowhere all my events and tasks disappeared from my Thunderbird. However, I have a full backup of .thunderbird folder.

How can I restore my calendar data?

I reverted these files to previous versions:

/home/me/.thunderbird/xxx.default/calendar-data/local.sqlite

/home/me/.thunderbird/xxx.default/prefs.js

but I still cannot see any data in my Thunderbird.

What else should I do?

Solution 1

Thunderbird data are saved in calendar-data/local.sqlite. In your case lighting 2.6.1 needs thunderbird version 24.0.1., so far thunderbird version in ubuntu is 24.0 and there is compatibility issue between the two versions as already mentioned there is known bug link to Bug #1244619.

Possible fix is downgrading lighting to version 2.6. use this link to download right lighting verision. Since lighting is quite a buggy add-on regular backups of your calendar data could be good practice, especially since you use lighting locally and there is no online calendar to serve as a backup.

Solution 2

I realize that this is an old question, but I was restoring lightning data after an OS crash. This is what I did to get my calendar working:

1. Close Thunderbird if it's running
2. Copy all files from backup profile directory's calendar-data subdirectory into your new profile directory. Likely local.sqlite is the only file needed, but I had a few others so I copied them over as well.

3. Open up prefs.js from your backup and look for lines like:

   user_pref("calendar.list.sortOrder", "3bf851bb-ece1-48df-8de3-c814c05e5fe7");

4. Open up the same file in your new profile directory and find the same line. If it has a different identifier as its value, replace all occurrences of it with the value from the backup file (there should be 6) and save that file.

5. Reopen Thunderbird

Solution 3

It seams to be a compatibility problem of thunderbird 24.0.0 with lightening 2.6.1 after a automatic update of the lightening add-on.

You'll find the bug description here: https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/thunderbird/+bug/1244619

There seams to be three possible options:

• waiting a day or so till the problem is solved (the error is critical, so we can hope it will be solved soon).
• downgrade to lightening 2.6.0 https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/thunderbird/addon/lightning/versions/?page=1#version-2.6
• manually upgrade to thunderbird 24.0.1

Comments

[Admin]

Do you use lighting to connect with some online calendar? Which version of Lighting and which version of thunderbird?

[Admin]

@danijelc Only local calendar. Thunderbird 24.0, Lightning 2.6.1

[Admin]

You probably need TB 24.0.1 version with lighting 2.6.1. There is known bug with your version of TB and lighting check it here downgrade Lightning 2.6 may be solution.

[Admin]

It's surprising, it worked for me for at least 2 months. I'll try downgrading, but how can I then restore my data?

[dev9]

How can I "manually upgrade" thunderbird?

[sir_brickalot]

The most important help were points 3. and 4. witout these you won't see your old calendars if you started from scratch. btw. this did not work for my google subcalendars but that was easy to resolve by readding the account. Still working for Thundebird 45.3.0

[JohnC]

Saved my bacon, still works in tbird 68