System Backup & Restore will not restore bookmarks or e-mails

OK, so a couple of days ago, my HP desktop crashed and then went through the whole System Recovery loop(I couldn't login to Safe mode, wouldn't let me past the System Recovery Screen). Well I backed up the entire C drive using Backup your files in the menu. Then it shows you all the file types it will back up; i.e photos, videos, e-mails and bookmarks. So I did that to an external hard drive and it comes out to 143GB.

Then I did a factory restore to my desktop.

Now comes my problem. I've been able to copy everything from the external hard drive using RecoveryMgr.exe which opens the WIM files and saves them to my C: hard drive under System Recovery Files. However it does not seem to work when it comes to putting in my old Thunderbird e-mails, contacts and such or in Firefox to restore my bookmarks, saved passwords. Any help would be most appreciative. Thank you

A default Firefox installation has all configuration info including bookmarks in C:\Users\your user name\appdata\roaming\ in a folder called Mozilla.

A default Thunderbird installation has all configuration info including email in C:\Users\your user name\appdata\roaming\ in a folder called Thunderbird.

If those folders got backed up, you should be able to drill down to them and restore.

I assume you used Windows Backup to do the back up. I have no idea if it will include those folders.

If those folders from your original installation still survive, you can restore by copying them to the same location on new Thunderbird/Firefox installations, over-writing the new folders created when you reinstall Thunderbird/Firefox.

It's a good practice to back up the Mozilla and Thunderbird folders periodically as a matter of course--just as you would any other data.