Mail files disappear after compacting (oe 6)

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A weird thing happened yesterday. OE on my wife’s computer ran through its periodical compacting cycle and when my wife opened up OE again, several folders from her mail sub-folder list were missing. They’re no longer in the dbx storage folder and the only thing I could salvage was a backup copy made (gulp) 2 months ago. Any idea why or how this happened and if there is any way to get the recent sub-folders gone-missing back again?

Many thanks in advance,

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I don’t know about possible salvage methods, but I’m fairly certain that now you’ve retrieved the backup copy and, presumably, put it back where the original file was, you’ll have overwritten any more recent file with the same name (OE folders are stored as files), so I’m afraid it’s highly unlikely you’ll be able to retrieve the more recent files now.

Sorry to have to be the bearer of bad news!

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I see this post was awhile ago and wonder if you solved the problem. It happened to me this morning. OE asked to compact, I said yes, and after compacting, nothing newer than August 2007 is in the inbox. Other folders appear to be (thank goodness) unaffected.

I am using OE6 and XP Home.

I did a hard shutdown and restart (I have previously had issues with messages disappearing after I do several searches and this has always cured it – this experience on more than one computer). That didn’t work. I did a system restore to two days ago, and that didn’t work either.

I have OE set to display all messages, not just those unread.

I read a post on another forum where the inbox.dbx had gotten too big and this apparently caused the problem, but in her case it also created an inbox(1).dbx file and her tech guy was able to recover everything from there. A Windows search on my computer reveals no inbox(1).dbx folder.

I have not reinstalled any backup files, so nothing so far has been overwritten. I still have messages from the past couple weeks on the server (I download messages to two computers and clean up the server about once a month), but when I hit “send and receive” they do not download, which seems to me to indicate that there is at least a record that they WERE downloaded, whether or not they still exist anywhere on my harddrive.

So – I CAN recover the data from the other computer and the backup – but anything that came in since the backup will not be organized. So if there is any way to recover it from this computer that would be great.

Thanks,
-cynthia

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The links in this Live Search: “outlook express” database missing all seem to talk about a corrupted database when missing e-mails are mentions. See All e-mail items may be missing when you start Outlook Express 6.0 Service Pack 1 or Outlook Express 6.0 Service Pack 2, Outlook Express e-mail messages are missing from the Inbox folder, & How to Repair Outlook Express.

You should consider upgrading to Windows Live Mail – Overview. It is the OE & Windows Mail follow-on product. It does not store messages in a database but as .eml files in a folder structure.

Joe

--Joe

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Thank you. These seem quite helpful. And I now also have more of an idea what may have contributed to the problem in the first place (I leave the program running for hours, the file had become very large, and the compaction was running while the program was closed ALL apply!!! Yipes. Who knew??)

Thanks,
-cynthia

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