Data storage when reinstalling Windows

#1

I reinstall Windows every 4 or 5 months to get rid of any accumulated junk. At present I’m using Thunderbird, and the profile is stored on a seperate hard drive. When I reinstall Windows, I point Thunderbird to the profile and it shows all my emails, contacts, etc.

As Thunderbird is not being developed anymore, I’m looking for an alternative email client. I like the look of eM Client, and I noticed that there is an option to specify a different storage location for the database.

Taking my reinstallation system in consideration, if I reinstall Windows/eM Client, and point it to the database on the seperate hard drive, will it automatically load all my accounts, saved emails, contacts, etc?

#2

Yes, if you move the database back to the default location or point eM Client to the new location, it will load all your data without any problems.

#3

I re-installed eM Client then changed my directory and all it did was reset all my settings and I had NO emails or accounts. Here’s the steps I took:

  1. Install eM Client
  2. Had to setup account before it would launch.
  3. After it launched, I went into setting and under Storage, I changed the location of the Database Directory and clicked OK

Back in eM Client and everything was reset with NO emails or accounts or settings.

So what did I do wrong?

#4

Hello,

can I ask you if in that 3rd step have you pointed it into folder with your backup database?

If you still have your backup try to manually unzip into C:\Users\Honza\AppData\Roaming\eM Client and it should work

regards
Jan

#5

I made a folder in my Documents folder to store my eM Client data. When I re-installed the program, I pointed it to that folder but I didn’t get all my saved emails back. I then tried to do a restore and thats when I lost ALL my settings. Sorry I forgot to add that step before. Luckily, I had done an EXPORT the day before So I was able to get everything back. BUT, if I hadn’t of done that export, I would have lost everything. And yes, I do still have my backups as thats what I used when I tried the RESTORE option.

#6

Hello,

I think I know what was cause of your problems, have you created more than one backup file?
This looks like that you have restored by accident from older backup so those settings couldn’t be restored as well.

anyway because this was quite serious issue we have tried it to recreated few times by your scenario - and this was only thing so far we could find as backup feature is always in new version under very detailed and strict testing routine.

regards
Jan

#7

Yes, I keep the last 5 backups, but when I tried to restore it, I used the newest file so obviously that is not the case. Don’t know what happened but I sure am glad I exported everything before I re-installed everything. I hope you can figure out what happened as I’m going to be re-installing my OS and all my programs in a week or so because I was doing some testing on my hardware to find the best configuration (nothing that would interfere with eM Client.)

All I know is that pointing eM Client to a new folder (which reset all my old files to new empty ones) didn’t work and neither did trying to use restore. Again, thank God for export (or more importantly, me using it, which is unusual as it is!! lol)

#8

Well here it is a week later and no answer. If you do decide to answer, here’s another question to go along with it. Why do I keep getting the error that “Backup has to be run from within the program”?

#9

Hello,

I am sorry for delayed answer, I found nothing to respond there to, as i have written backup feature tested very detailed and there are simply no bugs in it.

As for that backup, it has to be imported from client itself File - Restore… not externally.

regards
Jan