(OR: Cross Linked and Bummed Out)
A question for the computer savvy -
I have the .DBX files that Outlook Express uses to store messages in a folder called 'mail' in 'my documents' (not the default location.)
To my horror, I fired up OE this afternoon and found no mail - everything was gone except for the handful of new messages for the PDML.
Looking around - I realized that I had accidentally copied the 'mail' folder into a neighboring folder. Apparently OE made a new 'mail' folder and just started over...
So, I copied the contents of the relocated folder back into the 'mail' folder and figured I was good to go - but unfortunately everything was they except my 'inbox'. There was an 'inbox.dbx' file that was huge,but it was not being read. Looking closer, I realized that the 'deleted items' folder, which should of been huge, was pretty small. Everything else seems fine - my 'rules' are intact, the other folders are OK.
I found some software that would extract the contents of the OE .dbx mail files. Running it against 'inbox.dbx' showed that the contents of the purpored 'inbox' file were really my deleted files. And the contents of Deleted Items.DBX seems to be just a truncated version of the same file. I ran the utility against all the other folders, but no sign of my inbox stuff. I also ran a utility called WinUndelete which has been a real life saver in the past, when I have accidentally deleted files - and it shows no deleted version of inbox.dbx (or any deleted .dbx files at all...) (This program shows any deleted files that may still be sitting on the disk.) I did a disk check (this is an NTFS disk) and it found no problems.
So... I'm guessing that I'm just SOL on this one - and that somehow in accidentally moving the mail folder (which was possibly in use at the time) my inbox.dbx file got cross linked to my deleted items.dbx file. Is that plausible? Anything else I could try?
Oddly enough - it's not as catastrophic a lose as it might seem, as I have 'sent items' folder and address book intact - so I've been able to get back to people on the few pending transactions I have. I printed hard copies of any receipts etc just last week to get ready to do taxes, though I lost an handful that just came in these last few days. If there is a way to get some of this back, that would be nice.
Any thoughts, or am I toast?
- MCC
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Mark Cassino Photography
Kalamazoo, MI
www.markcassino.com
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