BB Data Recovery Guide

Restoring your emails after a computer crash can be a little tricky unless you know what you are doing. But once you know what you are doing it is as easy as putting butter on your bread. So let me take you back in time and show you how I recovered my emails.

The problem was I couldn’t find my emails from before the crash. I had someone restore all the files to an external drive, but had trouble getting them to load to the Outlook Express database. I did a Google search for “outlook express restore.” I received many 1000s of listings and selected a few to explore my problem.

After searching for about an hour, I had a few free tools available for download. In turn, I downloaded each of these tools and tried to restore my emails. However, they didn’t work, either because they were too complicated to use, requiring me to download more tools, or were plain junk.

Anyway, I eventually bought a neat utility for less that $40.00 that clearly showed me the cause of my problem, and was able to load the emails into Outlook Express. I couldn’t load the files because I was working with the wrong path.

A path outlines the folders you will open before reaching the address of a file or directory. You start on the top level of the path and descend to lower levels (folders) until you reach the bottom level (your file).

The path I had to follow looks like this: Name\Local Settings\Application Data\Identities\{DFF16927-88E6-4EAA…}\ Microsoft\Outlook Express\Backup.

Each item is a folder, beginning with the top level folder “Name” and going deeper until you reach the last folder “Backup.” This last folder holds the emails I later recovered.

Knowing the path to your emails can help you quickly restore them