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 (www.ontrack.com), a firm
specializing in recovering digital files.

The local repair shop referred Mr. Risdal to DriveSavers
(www.drivesavers.com), 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

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.

I'm not sure what you did with Shadow Explorer from reading that.
Also was your old email host using POP3 too?