Of the things that irks me when I have to rebuild my machine is having reconfigure Windows Live Writer for my blogs. Another huge pain is configuring Thunderbird for all of my non-work email accounts. I have a lot of folders and message rules setup for the various forums and email distribution lists I participate in and it’s frustrating to have to set those up again.
This time around, I was able to find a couple tools to help make this process fairly seamless.
Windows Live Writer Backup
This tool was pretty straightforward, easy to use and worked like a champ. Windows Live Writer launched right up after restoring my data. Both of my blogs settings and templates were retained. I had to re-enter my passwords, otherwise everything was retained.
http://wlwbackup.codeplex.com/
Thunderbird Backup
Mozbackup was very easy to use and has support for Portable applications. Thunderbird launched successfully and had all my settings and emails after the restore. The only thing I had to do was launch Thunderbird first to create a profile, the tool wouldn’t let me create one even though that’s an option in the program. However, once I launched Thunderbird the first time, the tool was able to restore to that profile.
http://mozbackup.jasnapaka.com/
Here are a few screenshots of the backup process.
