Lost emails after computer crash

So, my Dell PC decided to crash and I could not properly restore it. As I purchased it through Currys, it had to go back to them to fix it. They have completely reset it meaning I have had to reload all the software I put on it in the first place. I wasn’t able to do a backup of emclient but did copy the folder from the PC before it was reset. I have reinstalled emclient but cannot link up the saved folder to display all the past emails. Is there any way I can do this?

The database is stored by default in C:\Users\yourusername\AppData\Roaming\eM Client. You may have to enable hidden items in Explorer to get there.

You want to copy the complete contents of the \eM Client\ folder from the old location to the new. eM Client needs to be closed when you do that.

Hi Gary, many thanks for your prompt reply. I have done exactly what you have suggested, making sure that emclient was closed before I copied the folder over, but it doesn’t seem to have made any difference. The only thing I haven’t done is restart the pc, which I will try now. Otherwise, do you have any other thoughts?

Just restarted and still the same :frowning:

Then either the source folder you copied was not the database, or the target you copied it to is not the database. The one I gave above is the default location for eM Client downloaded from our website, but if you changed the database location, then it will be a different folder.

Or was/is this the MS Store version of eM Client. For that the database is in a folder something like C:\Users\yourusername\AppData\Local\Packages\eMClient.20054CA46072C_rq410mg92b554\LocalCache\Roaming\eM Client for Microsoft Store\ .

I can’t work this out! If I simply open file manager on the PC and go to c:users/user, there is no folder called AppData, yet if I go through Settings in EmClient, then the folder is there, which is where I copied all the files to.

As I said, you may have to enable hidden items in Explorer to get there.

Right, got it and done it, so now I can see all the files I copied there. There are considerably more files/folders copied over than were there after the reinstall of EmClient. Most of the files seem to be .dll type

No, there are no dll files in the database.

You have copied the application folder, C:\Program Files (x86)\eM Client, not the original database folder. They are not the same thing. The database folder is separate and as I said, it is in C:\Users\yourusername\AppData\Roaming\eM Client. That is the folder you need from the old device.

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Thanks for all the advice Gary. It looks as though I have lost everything then :frowning:

I’ll have to chalk that one up to experience, but it is more than inconvenient!

@Jeff76

If you have IMAP, Exchange or iCloud accounts and created any custom mail folders or labels directly under those type of accounts, all your email messages will come back as they were when you re-add your accounts. So might be ok.

Recommend when you get your account setup again, suggest to setup “automatic periodic backups” in eM Client via “Menu / Settings / General / Backup” which then creates dated .zip backup files by default in your user profile “Documents / eM Client” folder. You can then easily restore those via “Menu / File / Restore”.

Also suggest to copy those backup.zip files to an external drive and/or cloud drive regularly incase of hard-disk crashes or just changing drives etc

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Hi cyberzork

Very sound advice, thank you, and I will be following from now on!

The account is already set up again, but none of the emails have pulled through because they had only been saved to this pc. A painful lesson learnt.