I accidentally deleted years(!) of emails. How to restore?
Hi,
So, I wanted to set up automatically removal of deleted messages that were older than 30 days in my Trash folder. So I went into my settings and set the account to delete messages that were older than 30 days... thinking it only affected the ones in the Trash.
OK, I can see you smiling and shaking your head. In my defense, I didn't sleep enough last night.
Anyway... I'm in the process of restoring my profiles from my backups (at least I didn't get that wrong!)
What is the best way for me to get back all of the deleted data without losing the messages I received since my last backup (about 20 hours ago).
My plan is this:
- Restore yesterday's profile to a folder
- Move or rename my current profile
- Move the restored folder (with the correct name) into the location of the corrupted profile
My concern is that even if I do that, the IMAP data on the server is corrupt and will cause the messages to be deleted again. Is that the case? If so, is there a way for me to take the restored profile data and store the messages as local files? At least I won't have lost the data completely.
Thanks,
L
Chosen solution
OK, I was right about the IMAP server. So here is what I did:
- Restore yesterday's profile to a folder from my daily backups (whew!)
- Rename my current profile folder
- Move the restored profile folder into the location of the corrupted profile
- Go offline
- Start Thunderbird
- Copy all IMAP folders to Local Folders in TB
- Go online
- Let all folders sync
- Move messages in Local Folder back to IMAP folders
I think I'm back to where I was before this mistake.
Hopefully it helps someone sometime in the future. Let me know!
L
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Chosen Solution
OK, I was right about the IMAP server. So here is what I did:
- Restore yesterday's profile to a folder from my daily backups (whew!)
- Rename my current profile folder
- Move the restored profile folder into the location of the corrupted profile
- Go offline
- Start Thunderbird
- Copy all IMAP folders to Local Folders in TB
- Go online
- Let all folders sync
- Move messages in Local Folder back to IMAP folders
I think I'm back to where I was before this mistake.
Hopefully it helps someone sometime in the future. Let me know!
L