Manfred Fedorczuk wrote:
Folks,
my Seamonkey (SM) installation has deteriorated over the years and I
intend to start over.
I will install a new copy of SM and create the needed profiles (no
problem).
I will locate the old and the new profile directories (no problem).
I agree with Don Spam. There really is nothing to accomplish with a
reinstall. Unless you're convinced (with hard evidence) that there's
corruption of either program binaries or registry entries, a reinstall
is a waste of time. The only reason to consider a reinstall is if
you're shifting from 32-bit to 64-bit. Otherwise, things that are
frustrating are a part of your user profile.
Although I have rebuilt a Seamonkey profile, I'm not sure how productive
it was.
I think that a better approach is a profile reset. Help -> Restart with
Add-ons disabled, and follow the dialogs there. That will reset
preferences back to default, as well as disabling all extensions, but
not touch any of your other data you want to keep.
That one doesn't necessarily clear all problems (especially if there's
issues in some of the underlying databases), but I have occasionally
seen improved performance even with a one-time restart in Safe Mode.
My question:
Which parts/files from the old profiles do I need to copy over into the
new profile directories to keep
+ e-mails
+ bookmarks
+ stored passwords
but nothing else?
In particular, I do not want the old configuration settings or
add-on-settings to survive.
Profile reset is the easiest way of doing that.
Besides what you're mentioning here, if you're using Seamonkey for
email, then you probably also want to preserve your server configs,
especially if you have more than one email address. That's all stored
in the prefs.js file, along with most of your other preferences
settings. I will also suggest that you want to preserve your address books.
If you really want to do a more elaborate starting over, I suggest
creating a new profile with the Profile Manager, although as noted, for
mail, you'll need to choose between copying your entire prefs.js file,
or re-configuring your mail accounts by hand.
If your mail accounts are POP, then I strongly suggest that in both
profiles, you adjust your mail retention settings, so that new messages
are not deleted from the server immediately after download. If you have
two profiles, you want the ability of both profiles to see the same
messages.
As for what to transition to a new profile (make sure that Seamonkey
isn't open when you're working on files inside a profile), take a look
here for what you might want to transfer:
http://kb.mozillazine.org/Transferring_data_to_a_new_profile_-_SeaMonkey
. Ignore the content describing transition from Seamonkey 1, and look
further down for the Seamonkey 2 info.
One other suggestion -- if you are setting up a new profile, consider
the possibility of transition from POP to IMAP. Although there's
specific reasons to use POP, because IMAP leaves mail on the server, it
makes things a lot easier to get to the server from multiple points,
whether multiple profiles, different computers, or from the web, and
where the status of the mailbox (including folders) is identical, no
matter which access you use.
Smith
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