Outlook Express Email Recovery After Format. Help!!

[aceman817]

i recently formatted my laptop without realizing that i had setup an important bellsouth pop email account with outlook express. the emails are no longer on the server and bellsouth won't do anything to help me. i need to try and recovery the emails that were once on the computer. i tried installing the easy recovery 6.0 from ontrack that we use at work and that wouldn't help. i downloaded a couple demos of some other data recovery programs but they found dbx files that were too new and under 1MB. it didn't seem right. any ideas are greatly appreciated!!

--AL

 

[stevty2889]

Well since you formated and re-installed windows, it will be extremely difficult to get back those files, if you even can. Maybe one of those expenisve data recovery services could do it if they are that important. Not sure of any software that can help you, but the data is still hidden away, so somebody else may know of something that will work.

 

[JDCentral]

(This is where I usually say... "whoops.. you're screwed... switch to IMAP!!!". But I try to be a nice guy, so I don't say these things out loud)

 

[sourceninja]

You have already started installing things on the drive, the chance of getting it back is basically null. Had you of realized the moment you formatted it would of been a trivial matter to recover the data. It sounds like you are screwed.

I would use this as a lesson to always make weekly backups of your important files. I personally do a full disk image backup once a month and weekly incremental backups to a file server. After the first succesful backup of the month, I go back 2 months and delete my weeklys. I do this because I have a lot of mission critical files on my pc (source code, customer data, billing, etc) that would be a complete mess if I lost it. This allows me to recover my system almost instantly if I do anything dumb. Also, when ever I do a project or for that matter do anything that is mission critical, I burn it to a cd or dvd and put it in my fire safe. This way I have a cd in my safe for each clients project should something happen like all my hard drives fail.

I'm not saying you should go that far, but perhaps just a dvd backup weekly on a rotating set of 4-8 dvd-rw's would make sure you dont loose any data in the future.