I am helping a friend move from his 14 year old Sony Vaio running Windows 7 to a new W11 laptop.
He uses Windows Live Mail on the Vaio and I have successfully imported his emails into emClient. The Contacts failed but I have done that as a CSV file.
Now I need to get his emails from emClient on the Vaio to emClient on the W11 laptop and I tried the backup.
I plugged in an external drive, created a folder and ran backup from emClient but after 6 hours it had not offered me a location to save the backup to.
His Vaio is so slow. Everything takes 20 times longer.
The Vaio crashed and I have restarted it and am trying again but emClient is checking the database.
Is there a way I can just pull off the files needed to restore it to another laptop?
It is possible/probable the reason you have a backup issue is because you are using an external drive particularly with an old slow machine, you should use the default which will be shown at:
Menu ->Settings ->General ->Backup
To move your eMC data etc to a new computer
The best way to move all your data etc is through: Backup & Restore.
Follow these steps:
On the old device:
1./ Create a backup: Menu ->Backup
2./ Deactivate the license on this device: Menu ->Help ->License
3./ Find the .ZIP backup file and move it to your new device (with a USB)
The default location is …\Documents\eM Client)
On your new device:
1./ Install eMC (www.emclient.com/dist/latest/setup.msi)
2./Move the ZIP backup file to: …\Documents\eM Client (create the eM Client folder if it is not there)
3./ Having installed eMC skip initial setup
4./ Restore from your backup through Menu ->File ->Restore
5./ This will transfer everything to mirror your previous installation
6./ Activate your license in Menu ->Help ->License
¡Buena suerte!
skybat
¡Saludos desde Valencia la soleada en España!
¡Mis mejores deseos y mantente a salvo!
Thank you for your speedy reply and on a Sunday.
I had missed the location of the backup file but having navigated there I can now two 0Kb incomplete files. One dated yesterday that ran for about 6 hours and one from today at about 1130. My question is will they remain at 0kb until completed or should I be seeing an increase in file size a it goes along? I know my backup is going to take a while as the import into WLM took many hours but surely the backup should not be as long? Steve
If the backup zip file has incomplete in the name, then there probably isn’t enough free disk space to create the file. That could be simply not enough space, or the disk is formatted at FAT so only supports up to 4GB files, and the backup requires more.
Please try the second option in the blog page link I gave you which describes how to copy the database folder directly.
Yes — you can usually transfer eM Client data from the old Windows 7 Vaio to the new Windows 11 laptop without waiting for the built-in backup to finish. The important thing is to protect the existing email database first, especially since the Vaio has crashed and eM Client is checking its database.
Here is a practical approach:
Let eM Client finish checking the database if it is still making progress.
Avoid running another lengthy backup until you have copied the existing data.
Copy the eM Client data folder to your external drive, then transfer it to the new laptop.
Keep the original data untouched until you have confirmed that the emails are available on the new laptop.
How to copy the eM Client files manually
The official eM Client guidance confirms that you can transfer the entire database folder manually.
eM Client
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Wait for the database check to finish if possible, then exit eM Client completely.
Open File Explorer and enter this path in the address bar:
%appdata%\eM Client
Copy the entire eM Client folder to your external drive. Do not copy only individual database files.
On the new Windows 11 laptop, install eM Client and close it completely.
Back up or rename the newly created eM Client data folder, then copy the old folder into the equivalent location:
%appdata%\eM Client
Start eM Client and check that the emails and folders are present.
Important: Never copy the database while eM Client is running, as this can corrupt the data. If the database check repeatedly fails or the old computer crashes again, preserve a copy of the folder before attempting further repairs.
eM Client
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You can also check the backup destination under Menu → Settings → General → Backup. The default backup location is usually Documents\eM Client , not necessarily the external-drive folder you created.
Support
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If the emails were imported locally from Windows Live Mail, make sure you verify those messages on the new laptop before deleting anything from the Vaio. If some messages exist only locally, they may not be recoverable from the mail server.