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I use the lightening extension of Thunderbird. To have my own calendar on different machines, I put the .ics file in my Dropbox folder and this works fine. I also would like to share in the same way the configuration files of lightning (for example to keep the same color events on all the machines, for the kind of events I defined myself). I try to share some files of the .thunderbird forlder by chance, but either nothing happens, or Thunderbird closes. So which are the good files? Note the following:

  • the way I would like to share subfolders of the .thunderbird one is to put links in this one calling folders in my dropbox

  • I can't share all the .thunderbird folder, it is too big

  • I am running Ubuntu 12.04

thanks!

1 Answer 1

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I got this to work, and here's how I did it:

I use Thunderbird/Lightning as my email/calendar client on my main computer (Thinkpad W541, Ubuntu Unity, 16.04) and my travel Chromebook (Acer C720, Ubuntu XFCE, 16.04), and I wanted to regularly sync the calendar data between both machines. Suggestions online often mention Google Calendar, but I'd rather use open-source tools (that I control) to do the job. I use SeaFile (a FOSS DropBox equivalent) to sync folders & files between my machines.

Step 1: On my new Chromebook, I copy over my entire Thunderbird directory: rsync -zarv user@thinkpad:~/.thunderbird/ ~/.thunderbird/ Then, I install Thunderbird and open it: presto, all my accounts, old emails, and (most importantly) calendar events are accessible. Great!

Step 2: It looks like all relevant Thunderbird data are stored in ~/.thunderbird/blah.default/, with calendar data in ~/.thunderbird/blah.default/calendar-data/. On the Chromebook, I create a new calendar event, save it, and see that ~/.thunderbird/blah.default/calendar-data/local.sqlite has increased in size and has a newer "last-modified" timestamp. I conclude that local.sqlite contains all relevant calendar data.

Step 3: I close Thunderbird on both machines, then use SeaFile to sync the entire calander-data/ folder on both. I see that the newer filesize and timestamp have successfully synced on the Thinkpad. I open Thunderbird on the new machine, and there in the calendar is my new event. Success!

Drawbacks: The main drawback seems to be that if Thunderbird is open on both machines and either calendar is edited, syncing the calendar-data files sometimes causes the other machine's Thunderbird to crash. They just weren't built to handle that sort of I/O. But otherwise: it works great!

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