contacts

[fatguy]

i recently had my old drive crash. reinsatlled windows 7 64 on an old drive. up and running fine. tried to locate my contacts from a back up, says folder is empty. properties says folder has 13 files and 4 folders. what am i missing?
thanks in advance,
michael

 

[mr pc]

What mail client/software this is backed up from?

What's the file extension?

Did you try importing this file back into your address/contacts?

.csv files are quite common

 

[roncerr]

...tried to locate my contacts from a back up, says folder is empty. properties says folder has 13 files and 4 folders. what am i missing?...

If you're talking about WLM, and if you had been "signing-in", your contacts should have been maintained at the contacts.live.com website and would not have needed a backup. If you were not signing in, and therefore needed a backup, how did you make the backup? Export/Import would be how to backup/restore. Did you instead save the "Windows Live Contacts" folder which is under "<username>/appdata" folder tree? Hope you did not just save the "<username>/contacts" folder since that is not where WLM puts the contacts.

 

[fatguy]

yes, its windows live mail. and i was not signing in. "back up" was actually the old drive that had crashed. a friend put it in his computer and was able to get it to spin again. i have a new drive and new cpoy of windows 7.
when i try and import the files using the browse button, the folder is not there. so i made a copy of the folder and placed it on the desktop. now it finds the folder, but thinks the folder is empty. if i open the folder, it says it is empty. but if i open the properties of the folder it tells me that there are 13 items and 4 folders.

thanks michael

 

[pacinitaly]

maybe you overlooked this

 

[roncerr]

...when i try and import the files using the browse button, the folder is not there. so i made a copy of the folder and placed it on the desktop. now it finds the folder, but thinks the folder is empty. if i open the folder, it says it is empty. but if i open the properties of the folder it tells me that there are 13 items and 4 folders...

If you saved the "Windows Live Contacts" folder, it should be the right one. But you won't be able to see the contents unless you "unhide" them as suggested by pacinitaly. However you can't use import/export since you must do that from within a working copy of WLM or another mail program that exports to ".csv". Another method that works is "drag and drop" of the contents of your backed up folder to the contents of the new "Windows Live Contacts" folder within Windows Explorer. You may have to repeatedly say "try again" and "yes" when asked if you really want to do this, but eventually the new WLM contacts window will look just like it did in the old WLM program from which it came.

 

[fatguy]

thank you. got the files.
roncerr,
i did a copy and paste of the back-up file into the new contacts folder. but i made a "new folder" within that folder and put the "new" contact.edb file in that folder first (to have a copy of the few contacts that i have) and then did the paste with no luck. it still just has the "new" contacts, none from the back-up copy. you say just drag and drop into the folder? i have seen posts about going into the registry and trying to fix the problem, but i am not that confident messing around there.

thanks again for all your help.