Can't restore firefox settings with .mozilla backup

I have an up to date Firefox and Thunderbird in Debian.
Here is what my dot files look like

nevj@mary:~$ ls -l .mozilla
total 12
drwx------ 2 nevj nevj 4096 Jan 28  2021 extensions
drwx------ 6 nevj nevj 4096 Jan 28  2021 firefox
drwx------ 2 nevj nevj 4096 Jan 28  2021 systemextensionsdev
nevj@mary:~$ ls -l .thunderbird
total 24
drwx------ 13 nevj nevj 4096 Apr 19 21:57  6ozfwg4n.default-default
drwx------  3 nevj nevj 4096 Apr 19 19:59 'Crash Reports'
drwx------  2 nevj nevj 4096 Feb 15  2021  gainyiif.default
-rw-r--r--  1 nevj nevj   62 Feb 15  2021  installs.ini
drwx------  2 nevj nevj 4096 Feb 15  2021 'Pending Pings'
-rw-r--r--  1 nevj nevj  259 Feb 15  2021  profiles.ini

So do you have all those directories and files in the files you copied in?
My Firefox is 98.1.0esr(64-bit) Thunderbird is 91.8…0(64-bit)

I dont know of any recent changes in the way .mozilla or .thunderbird are arranged.

If yours are the same… you must have to do something to Firefox to get it to look at uploaded config files instead of starting out as a new user.

Neville