Thunderbird emails on the go

I spend quite some time checking emails at home, after work. Naturally, I have two PCs and each of them has its own Thunderbird copy and the data. In addition to the problem of having duplicate copies of incoming mails, it's also difficult to manage the replies, i.e. sent mails. Making one centralized email store is just a matter of time. Today I got some time to check how to move my Thunderbird email data from the hard drive to the USB external disk. I've followed pretty much the instructions found here: http://kb.mozillazine.org/Moving_your_profile_folder. And for those of us who learn by example, here are my steps: 1. close Thunderbird 2. At home directory, cd .thunderbird 3. cp -a profile-name /media/usbdisk 4. cd ~/Desktop/thunderbird 5. ./thunderbird -profilemanager 6. Click on "Create Profile...". Give it a name. 7. Click on "Choose Folder..." 8. Select the folder on /media/usbdisk 9. Select the new profile and then click on "Start" 10. Check Edit/Account Settings... and voila, the folders are now from the /media/usbdisk Late that night, I did the same trick on my home PC, and it works! Now I can bring my emails with me. For some reason, when I first tried it on my MacBook Pro, it failed. Well, to be more specific, it seemed like it was trying to synchronizing with the email server and never finished.

Just when I was going to give up, I tried it once again a day after. It worked! Come to think of it, perhaps I wasn't patient enough when I first tried it. After all, MacFuse Core + NTFS-3G is not really fast for my 3.9GB Thunderbird profile, even on my 2.4GHz MBP.