Outlook Express 6 Recovery

Recently, my brother deleted a bunch of my programs to try to spite me, out of revenge. When I opened my Outlook Express, my emails were gone. I have no backups, and I tried a system restore. The system restore to a point when I still had the emails did nothing. I need some major help. Thanks.

 

http://support.microsoft.com/kb/270670/

http://insideoe.tomsterdam.com/backup/simple.htm

http://www.kellys-korner-xp.com/xp_oe.htm

 

JFriesen--You have not told us what version of Windows you run. That could affect some of the advice.
Have you run a Search or Find for *.dbx and *.wab files? If you find them, your brother may not have deleted them, but only hid them. (Have you looked in the Recycle Bin?)
If you do not find them, then they are probably really deleted.
When a file is deleted, it still remains on the harddrive, but Windows regards the space it occupies as space that can be use to write something new over it. So you want to use your hard drive as little as possible until the following is tried.
Your only hope is an Undelete program such as Restoration
http://www.webattack.com/get/restoration.html
I suggest you download to a floppy if you can and run Restoration from there. Restoration is one of the few Undelete programs small enough to fit on a floppy, which is why I suggested it. As mentioned, you want to use your hard drive as little as possible before trying to Undelete.
If you find the .dbx and .wab files by either procedure suggested, post back for info on how to get them back to working, unless you know that

 

Running a search for .DBX found the files, but when I imported them, they were empty. Is it even possible that he did it? Because the DBX's are still there, just they don't contain the data any more. I'll try a search for WABs, and also, that restoration program didn't have any finds for DBXs.

 

JFriesen--You cannot read .dbx files by just clicking on them. Right click|Properties on the .dbx files you found and see if there is any content as shown on the Size line. If not, the dbx files you have found are new (empty) ones generated by Windows on a reboot.
It may be time for Restoration.

In the future consider making backups of your data, ideally to external locations.

 

E-mails (.dbx)

Need your help - my outlook express 6.0 has
compressed my emails - how can i get them back.
I have found a lot of .dbx files - and they seems to
be large. So how can I import og get my emails back?
Tried a lot of freeware software, but when I load the dbx folders - they
are empty - but due to the size of files - I can´t imagine why...

Maybe OE6 has another place where it hides it´s compressed emails?