How-To Geek Forums Topic: Recover Deleted Emails Fail

How-To Geek Forums Topic: Recover Deleted Emails Fail - Using Shadow Explorer http://www.howtogeek.com/forum/ How-To Geek Forums Topic: Recover Deleted Emails Fail - Using Shadow Explorer en Fri, 09 Jan 2009 02:16:19 +0000 whs on "Recover Deleted Emails Fail - Using Shadow Explorer" http://www.howtogeek.com/forum/topic/recover-deleted-emails-fail-using-shadow-explorer#post-46110 Fri, 05 Sep 2008 16:04:37 +0000 whs 46110@http://www.howtogeek.com/forum/ Janet, I would think the first thing to check is whether you have a restore point going back as far as April 08. You can easily do that in Shadow Explorer or in Vista Backup/Restore Center or in Command Prompt with VSSADMIN LIST SHADOWS. I doubt though, that April restore points still exist because that would require about 200GB of shadowstorage. jd2066 on "Recover Deleted Emails Fail - Using Shadow Explorer" http://www.howtogeek.com/forum/topic/recover-deleted-emails-fail-using-shadow-explorer#post-46038 Fri, 05 Sep 2008 03:45:57 +0000 jd2066 46038@http://www.howtogeek.com/forum/ I'm not sure what you did with Shadow Explorer from reading that. Also was your old email host using POP3 too? jd2066 on "Recover Deleted Emails Fail - Using Shadow Explorer" http://www.howtogeek.com/forum/topic/recover-deleted-emails-fail-using-shadow-explorer#post-45816 Thu, 04 Sep 2008 03:19:23 +0000 jd2066 45816@http://www.howtogeek.com/forum/ By email client I meant the program you use to read email which according to your post is Windows Mail. Windows Vista would be your computer's Operating System. As for how Windows Mail stores data: In C:\Users\[UserName]\AppData\Local\Microsoft\Windows Mail |_ Local Folders - Contains messages in the Local Folders section all in eml format (Also winmail.fol, not sure what it is) |_ Microsoft Communities - Something to do with the Microsoft Communities feature |_ Stationery - Contains Stationery files |_ account{*}.oeaccount - Can be multible files, they store account information |_ edb*, WindowsMail.* - Files that make up a database that indexes the eml files for faster access Note: If you have an IMAP account then there will be a folder with the name of the server with eml files like in the Local Folders folder with it's messages. Also * in the above list means any set of characters. I don't have time right now to answer the rest of the questions so I'll get to it sometime tomarrow. Janet on "Recover Deleted Emails Fail - Using Shadow Explorer" http://www.howtogeek.com/forum/topic/recover-deleted-emails-fail-using-shadow-explorer#post-45289 Tue, 02 Sep 2008 01:49:21 +0000 Janet 45289@http://www.howtogeek.com/forum/ Thanks for the reply! By email client, do you mean Outlook or Vista? I am running Vista - Windows Mail, not Outlook nor Outlook Express - PC bought new in March. Incoming is POP3; Outgoing is SMTP. I have an ISP company that hosts my domain and email. Unfortunately I joined them on 6/2 (they have all emails on their server from 6/2, but I'm looking for something from 4/14 when I was with another webhoster. I had no idea what I was doing in Shadow, but I found a file called Everything when in the Email section. I exported it, and it populated into my Windows Mail. I received all emails received since 6/30/2008, unfortunately none were the one I was looking for. I tried to do it again, hoping I could find more or go back to an earlier date, but couldn't go earlier than 6/30. In fact, I couldn't even find the Everything file when looking. As far as what button or menu I used, I have NO IDEA! Since then, I tried Paralogic, PC Tools File Recovery (not helpful), Window Mail Recovery and another program called nsware - also not helpful. Is there a good program out there for Vista? Also how do I find out the File Format of Vista Windows Mail emails. Are they the same as Outlook and Express? Thanks for any help. jd2066 on "Recover Deleted Emails Fail - Using Shadow Explorer" http://www.howtogeek.com/forum/topic/recover-deleted-emails-fail-using-shadow-explorer#post-44905 Sun, 31 Aug 2008 06:29:24 +0000 jd2066 44905@http://www.howtogeek.com/forum/ What email client do you use? Where did you browse to in Shadow Explorer to get your email, what files did you save and what button/menu did you use to restore them? Scott on "Recover Deleted Emails Fail - Using Shadow Explorer" http://www.howtogeek.com/forum/topic/recover-deleted-emails-fail-using-shadow-explorer#post-44901 Sun, 31 Aug 2008 05:04:43 +0000 Scott 44901@http://www.howtogeek.com/forum/ Janet, welcome to HTG. I know the article to follow is small solace. Hopefully another regular can help you out. If not, there still may be hope. July 14, 2005 E.R. for Hard Drives By ERIC A. TAUB NOVATO, Calif. - He knew it was important, but backing up his hard drive was the last thing on Ryan Risdal's mind. Mr. Risdal, 35, was too busy rearing four children and caring for his ill wife. One day after her death last August, Mr. Risdal was trying to recover some pictures from his computer to display at his wife's funeral. But the computer would not cooperate, and the local repair shop told him he was out of luck. The drive was inoperable, and nothing could be retrieved. "I had six years of digital pictures on the drive, and I hadn't backed up in years," said Mr. Risdal, a maintenance supervisor in Grass Valley, Calif., in the Gold Rush country northeast of Sacramento. According to those in the data recovery business, computer users who think they can escape Mr. Risdal's fate are mistaken. "Eventually, every hard drive will fail," some even within months, said Todd Johnson, vice president for operations at OnTrack Data Recovery (<a href='www.ontrack.com'>www.ontrack.com</a>), a firm specializing in recovering digital files. The local repair shop referred Mr. Risdal to DriveSavers (<a href='www.drivesavers.com'>www.drivesavers.com</a>), another company offering data retrieval from hard drives, flash memory, diskettes and optical media. After several days' work, DriveSavers had recovered his entire photo library. If all computer users backed up their hard drives, the data recovery industry would barely exist. But the routine, like flossing teeth, is practiced regularly by few. And as hard drive capacity explodes, the consequences of catastrophic failure mushroom. Hard drives now store not just documents but photos, music and movies as well, electronically embedded on a platter spinning at 10,000 revolutions a minute (300 times the speed of an LP record); access is by a read/write head floating a hair's breadth above, and flying back and forth at 60 miles an hour. If the head falls onto the platter or picks up a jot of dust, the data can be rendered unreadable. Not every hard drive's files can be recovered, but rates are improving. "Eight years ago, 50 percent of our drives could not be restored," said Scott Gaidano, DriveSavers' co-founder. Now up to 90 percent of the data can be salvaged from 85 to 90 percent of drives, Mr. Gaidano said. The cost can run to several thousand dollars - the bigger the rush, the higher the price. Mr. Gaidano says that hard drives are so unreliable that they "should not exist today." Yet they are ubiquitous - in laptops that are tossed onto airport security belts, and on iPods and camcorders used while jogging and maneuvering around moguls. When they fail, panic is often the reflex. Many call Mr. Johnson's company, or ActionFront, DriveSavers and ESS Data Recovery, fearing that their most crucial records and most cherished memories have just been incinerated. DriveSavers employs Kelly Chessen, a former suicide-prevention counselor, to calm distraught customers. "You get nervousness, anger, crying," Ms. Chessen said. "People fear they'll lose their jobs" if the data is not recovered. And at times they say that life will no longer be worth living. "I ask them if they're really thinking about committing suicide," she said. Fortunately, no one has. DriveSavers operates from an anonymous office building in Novato, 24 miles north of San Francisco, that houses a "clean room" for inspecting drives and separate data extraction rooms for the most common computer operating systems. DriveSavers receives some units that to most would look unsalvageable. Outside its executive offices, the company displays some of its more challenging successes: hard drives that have been burned, submerged in salt water or run over by trucks. Depending on the size of the drive, the complexity of the problem and the requested turnaround time, recovery costs at DriveSavers range from $500 for the slowest service - five to seven days - and fewest recoverable files, to $8,900 for a rush job, which will begin the moment the drive arrives and continue around the clock until the data has been extracted. For those customers who can wait up to seven days, recovery tops out at $2,700 for a drive up to 600 gigabytes. For one- to two-day turnaround, expect to pay $900 to $3,900. When nothing can be recovered - typically when drives cannot spin or data has been overwritten - DriveSavers charges a $200 inspection fee. After hearing of Mr. Risdal's plight, DriveSavers restored his data free, and even bought Christmas presents for his children. But for most, rescue comes at a steep price. "I learned a very important lesson and it cost me a lot of money," said John DeVries, general manager of a sporting goods company in Auburn, N.Y. In May, Mr. DeVries's three-year-old hard drive crashed on his Dell Latitude x200 laptop, taking with it a year's worth of company e-mail, family photos and 600 business contacts stored in Outlook. "I was really panicked. I really felt lost; it was everything I had," said Mr. DeVries, who knew to back up but had not done so in several months. He paid $2,700 to get all his files back. When a drive arrives at DriveSavers or one of its competitors, it is typically inspected in the clean room to prevent dust contamination. If it got wet, it is submerged in a solvent to remove residue. Because data can be retrieved only from operating drives, the company will try to get the mechanism running temporarily - in the case of DriveSavers, by using components from its inventory of more than 10,000 different models. A copy of the drive's contents is then recorded on a server for protection and another copy is transferred to a functioning hard drive. Using commercial and proprietary software tools, the company extracts the data from that copy. Retrieved files are sent to the customer using DVD's, a new hard drive or Internet file transfer. The company keeps all files confidential, and erases them from its servers one month after delivery to the customer. Child pornography, however, is not covered by the confidentiality agreement. Is it worth spending thousands of dollars to retrieve files? It was for William Storkson, a motion picture sound designer in Novato who lost four reels of work on the independent film "Target Audience 9.1" when an external drive connected to his Apple Power Mac G5 malfunctioned. He had bought the drive as a backup three months earlier, when his Mac's two-year-old external drive started to falter. That drive was by this time dead. "To rebuild the data from scratch would have taken me one to two months of 40-hour weeks," he said. Instead Mr. Storkson paid DriveSavers $2,300, and in three days he had all his files back. Last November, Suzy Shechtman of Great Neck, N.Y., was editing scenes for "The Hidden Life," a film about an order of Episcopalian nuns, when the six-month-old, 200-gigabyte drive failed on her Power Mac G4. She tried to revive it with various commercial disk utility programs, but nothing worked. "I had bought a second hard drive and never used it to back up, though I meant to," Ms. Shechtman said. "I figured the project was all over." Fortunately, the drive maker, Western Digital, agreed to pick up the recovery cost. Ms. Shechtman now keeps multiple copies on two 200-gigabyte drives and one 600-gigabyte internal drive. But even that is not necessarily a fail-safe strategy. "Out of six drives I've bought, five have been replaced, and the longest lasted only one year," she said. But when it comes to backing up data, most people remain unconcerned - even Mr. Gaidano, despite all the troubles he has seen. "I've lost more data than most, because I do not back up my laptop," he said. "The day I back up is the day I should shut the company down." Next Thursday in Circuits: The basics of backing up data. * Copyright 2005 The New York Times Company Janet on "Recover Deleted Emails Fail - Using Shadow Explorer" http://www.howtogeek.com/forum/topic/recover-deleted-emails-fail-using-shadow-explorer#post-44900 Sun, 31 Aug 2008 04:40:16 +0000 Janet 44900@http://www.howtogeek.com/forum/ I'm trying to recover deleted emails in Shadow Explorer (using Vista Home Premium). I recovered some only from 6/30/08 (need back from 4/08). Also Shadow only recovered "received emails", not my sent, or deleted, etc. In fact, somehow (by my mistake) it overroad my current email. All those seem to be lost. Also, is there a way to view recycle bin at particular back date? I have a small business and need to respond to a client asap. Appreciate any help you can give me. Thx