Contacts & mail recovery - please help!

Following the demise of my hard-disk (nothing recoverable), I need to recover my eM Client data . . . if possible! I don’t have any backups generated from within eM Client, but I do have a backup of my '%User%/AppData folder from one day prior to the failure of the drive. I have the ‘eM Client’ folders from both AppData/Roaming and AppData/Local. These appear to contain all of the information I should need to restore the app to it’s previous state.

I’ve installed a new HDD and re-installed eM Client (free version), however, I didn’t have the original license key, so I’ve activated it with a new license key. I’m using IMAP, so assumed all the emails and folders would be reinstated when I setup the account again in eMC. Not so. Due to the obsolete/archaic email system used by my email provider (Plusnet), the folders I created from within eMC - and the emails contained within - don’t actually seem to exist on Plusnet’s servers. It seems that they were actually stored on my local drive and I simply ‘subscribed’ to those folders from Plusnet webmail, which meant everything was then synced between eMC, Plusnet webmail and my iPad. I’d assumed the folders I created from within eMC were copied to Plusnet’s servers, but that doesn’t seem to be the case.

The question is, how do I restore the old data from the AppData backup? I’ve tried replacing both the entire Local and Roaming eMC folders on the new drive with the ones from the backup. When I launched eMC again after doing so, it asked me to setup the email account again from scratch and none of the old data (folders/contacts) appeared.

Are there specific files/folders I can replace from the backup, rather than the entire folders? Do I need to obtain the original license key, uninstall eMC (or deactivate the new license) and use the original license key? Could I then replace the entire Local and Roaming folders to reinstate eMC as it was before the drive failed?

If this isn’t possible, is there some way I could recover just the contacts from the AppData backup?

Please help! Thank you.

One of the issues with using a backup of your hard disk, is that if eM Client was not closed during the backup, it will be useless.

The license key will not affect the data.