I can't restore Windows Live Mail Inbox from a Windows Backup.

Wartweasel · 06 Mar 2017

Gentlepersons,

I recently deleted (accidentally) all of the emails in my wife's Inbox in Windows Live Mail. I also emptied her Deleted Items folder so now some important emails that she was keeping in the Inbox are gone.

With some assistance on another forum, I was able to locate the Inbox folder for her Windows Live Mail account, and since I did a full backup of the hard drive a week ago, I figured it would be easy to simply restore the Inbox from last week.

I plugged in the backup drive, went to Backup and Restore in Control Panel and selected Restore My Files. I was able to navigate to the Windows Live Mail Inbox on the backup drive and I selected it and clicked Restore. A window opened stating that the restore was complete, but there was also a pointer to a log file. I opened the log file and saw that the restore operation had "skipped" restoring all of the email files in the Inbox.

I've restored data files before without any difficulty, so I must be doing something wrong in this case. Can anyone shed some light on why I couldn't restore the email files to the Inbox folder using the Windows Backup and Restore feature?

Thanks in advance.

RolandJS · 06 Mar 2017

My wild guess is that you have to restore more than one file associated with her Inbox. What those files are - I do not know. Perhaps you can make a backup of what there is now, do a full restore of her Mail box data folder[s] and files. If that works, she will have to reGet from her emailers what was received and what was sent -- the emails that were not backed up since that week ago's backup.
[Sorry about the English, I'm a middle school cafeteria with lots of noise and distractions.]

Wartweasel · 08 Mar 2017

Okay, here is how I solved the problem. I found the email files on the Backup drive using Windows Restore. This time, instead of trying to restore them to the original location, I decided to restore them to a new folder. That operation worked successfully. Then I just copied the restored email files to the Inbox folder in Windows Live Mail and VOILA they were all there again.

The only problem is that when I did the backup, my wife had 1400 emails in her Inbox. (She hadn't checked it in quite a while) So now she'll have to sort through and get rid of the ones that she doesn't need. Then I'm going to show her how to create Storage folders in Live Mail so that she can keep the important stuff out of the Inbox.