Sunday, May 8, 2011

Lost Evolution emails after upgrading to Ubuntu 11.04 (Natty Narwhal)

The new version of Evolution Email (v2.32) that comes with Ubuntu 11.04 now uses "~/.local/share/evolution" as the new storage location. The Ubuntu upgrade process doesn't transfer the existing data to the new location automatically. To manually fix this,

  • Rename the newly created "evolution" folder in "~/.local/share" to something else first, just in case.
  • Move the ".evolution" folder from the home directory to "~/.local/share" and rename it to "evolution".

For Evolution data stored in a non-default location (e.g. /mydata/EvolutionMail), just create a new symbolic link like this (after renaming the newly created "evolution" to something else first):-

ln -s /mydata/EvolutionMail ~/.local/share/evolution

4 comments:

  1. Cool. Helped me retrieve my Evolution settings.

    Thanks!

    ReplyDelete
  2. Thank god, not even the Evolution FAQ mentions this...

    ReplyDelete
  3. This is a lifesaver, thanks!

    ReplyDelete
  4. Cool, thank you very much, This hint saved me too.
    I have several users on Ubuntu, one for each members of my family. Migrating from 11.04 to 11.10
    made the upgrade of the main user only, and "forgot" all the others! I had manually made a backup but was unable to reload the mail

    ReplyDelete