The disk in my laptop failed a couple of weeks ago, and I replaced it. I’ve now been able to recover some of the data from the old disk, including the appdata/roaming/emclient folder if necessary. Now, I have a few questions / issues around this:
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I have an IMAP account with Virgin Media (UK) and an Exchange account with my company systems, so neither relies on any local storage for mail. What I would like to restore, is all my contacts from my previous use of EM Client. It’s annoying to have to search old email for contact details when I want to email someone. So I tried replacing the contact_data and contact_index files in the emclient folder, but although EM Client eventually started, the contacts folder was empty. Can I somehow import the contacts from the old setup?
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Because of the types of the two accounts I am using, it appears EM Client wants to store any new contact information in my Exchange contacts folder. I’m rather confused about what options I have here - can EM Client store contact information locally? It doesn’t seem to take any account of the contact information in the Virgin IMAP account, which is configured for Mail only (this may be due to the current issue with Virgin Media and Oauth).
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If the contact information from the old setup can’t be recovered, is there a way I could scour my email inbox and sent folders and recover all the people I’ve corresponded with, and add them to a new contacts folder? Obviously that would lead to some duplication, but at least I’d have contact details for all those people, rather than having to look for some email correspondence with them to find it, each time I want to communicate with them.
Thanks
Nick
Hello Nick, unfortunately this is not a supported way of restoring your data, however if you have your eM Client folder restored from the backup in Roaming. Try to replace the folder in AppData/Roaming with this restored folder and try to load eM client using this database as a workaround for your missing backup.
However if the database data is corrupt you won’t be able to restore your contacts from the database.
eM Client database only includes your recipients cache, so if you’ll be sending your emails for a while without any contacts you should be able to import the recipients at once into one of your contacts folders from the application settings, but still won’t be able to include more information in the contacts than the recipients email address.
Hope this helps.
Thanks Paul, I understand that I would only get email addresses, but to be honest, I don’t use an email client to store other information, really. I have a phone for that.
Can you describe how I would “import recipients from the application settings”?
PS this is in part due to another very annoying EM Client feature, which is its inability to do a backup while the client is running. Since my client is running 100% of the time I’m using a PC, there isn’t an obvious way to do backups, except as a manual ad-hoc process, when I remember (which, so far, is never). Is any thought being given to improving the backup process so it can run at the same time as the client?
Prompted by this I’ve just tried to run a backup - but the only way seems to be to schedule it from within the client, then exit so it can run - you can’t even run it interactively with any ease. Doh! 
Hello Nick, unfortunately the backup feature needs the application to not be accessed by the application as while the application would be saving new data it might overwrite part of the already backed up database file/table which could result in a database corruption, however we’re aware of the current discomfort during backup and we’re working on improving this for future releases.
Regarding importing your cached contacts/recipients, navigate to Tools > Settings > Mail > Compose and select “Show recipients”, new window with your recipients should be shown. To import the contacts select the recipients using ctrl+a and right click the selection, option to “save as contacts” should be available in the dropdown.
Hope this helps.
Thanks for that Paul. Unfortunately that only lists the contacts I’ve accessed since the new disk and the re-installation. Never mind.
Nick
I was trying to suggest that, unfortunately there’s no other way of restoring the recipients from your emails other than adding them manually.
Sorry about the inconvenience, let us know if you come across any other issues or questions about the application, we’ll be happy to help.
Thank you.