... you just hate Microsoft! Really!
This is one of them. After backing up and reinstalling Windows on what used to be my main machine, I discovered that all the emails stored on it were lost. I have always archived all my emails since the beginning of time (or whatever you call the beginning of your internet career) and now I have lost two full years of emails dating from April 2002 to February 2004 (my most active period). Basically, I have to start over from scratch.
Here's the problem. I used Outlook Express. Outlook Express saves its data in the
Local Settings\Application Data\Identities directory of your home directory (e.g.,
C:\Documents and Settings\thesaur. Which would be unproblematic. However, unlike reasonable programs, if you copy your home directory, (even if you specifically copy the
Identities directory, you won't have anything). For some reason, MS placed all the data in clsid (e.g., "{4432BD4B-5122-41B1-BD3C-AD5B5422172D}") subdirectories. Which sometimes are empty when copied. Or at least seem empty when viewed in Windows (accessing the drive in Linux sometimes helps, but then you need to cache the contained data somewhere so you can access it from Windows again - unless you use the
Captive driver for NTFS). You'd have to manually enter each one and copy the data from inside. Or follow this
Knowledge Base article describing how to backup the files from
inside OE.
I don't want to even mention the difficulties of backing up your home directory. Let's just say that MS seems to have designed the system to be hard to backup from within windows. It seems that even when people are logged out, files in their home directory are being accessed by windows processes. You try to copy, and it comes up with an error about a file being accessed. And then cancels the copying process. So you have to start over from scratch, guessing where the offending file is located and trying to copy all the others. It would seem that MS could at least have considered that when people want to copy or delete multiple files (or a directory full of files), they might want to apply the action to all possible files there. But no, MS has different logic. And you can't even see what process is accessing what file. Which would make things a
whole lot easier.
Let's just say that I am extremely pleased with
Thunderbird, as it doesn't have that quirk. If you back up your directory, you've got it. No funny business. Outlook also is better than Outlook Express. At least you can get to the data.
Just about now, I'd be thinking about jumping over that bridge... but when all's said and done, email is just email, and I know all my posting to various archived online mailing lists is still there. I can't rewrite history. But hey, how often do you get to start over with a (nearly) blank slate?
