Outlook Express - disappearing emails (1 Viewer)

I just (2 hrs ago) decided to comply to the "compact messages to reduce disk space" prompt, which I see every time I close down OE.

Now - I remember why I haven't done that for a year or so - because of losing many emails to the recycle bin - I only wish I remembered that!

As my PC was getting slow I decided to do a clean up first - no problem - then I did the OE compacting - fine.

Then I noticed my hard disk space had decreased some 2GB - Oh better try cleaning up again (very dumb of me!).

Of course I deleted the recoverable (I did that once myself by reading stuff on the web) dbx file from OE...ouch.

When I open OE - ALL my emails from after 2010 are missing.

Is there anything I can do about this. I'm already coming to terms that there probably isn't.

All the best

Simon

Hi Simon,
All is not lost !!
When a file is deleted in Windows it doesn't "vanish" it just means that the space it occupies on the hard drive is made available to over wright.
So the dbx file is still there.
Your course of action depends on how important the emails are to you.
First of stop using the puter that the files are on.
If you don't use it they can't be over written.
The less free space on the hard drive, the more chance they will be.
The next step is up to you and you tec competence and availability of other puters.
You obviously know enough to be dangerous
Look up Open Source Data Recovery software.
Open Source means free, provided by very kind devs for us computer using folks.
You would then install this on a different hard drive to the one you want to recover from, this hard drive needs to have enough free space to hold all the data from the drive you are recovering from.
Preferably you are recovering to a drive with only the OS on it, or to a partition on a drive with nothing else on it.
The other option is take your computer or just the hard drive if you know how to get it out to a PC repair place.
Any half way decent shop will have software and spare drives to do this for you.
These days it's not rocket science just time consuming, if you have a big HD very time consuming.
Remember that they will recover a lot of what you thought was deleted .........
Good luck on getting your file back.

Thanks Grahame! So - as I don't have easy access to another pc it looks like I will have to take the big lump (home pc) to my local friendly repair shop. My hard drive is only 80GB so hopefully won't take ages.

If it works its worth it - thanks again.