How can I recover deleted folders - also - question about editing/deleting msf files
Context: My wife accidentally deleted a series of folders from Thunderbird v.24.6.0
She says that the system warned her that there was "not enough space" or something like that (she doesn't remember clearly) and asked her if she wanted to "delete them permanently" (or something like that), but she pressed "yes" anyway. She then freaked out, and when I came in to see what she was screaming and crying about, she told me the above story.
SO, after spending the last 2-3 hours reading through help articles and finding my local Mail file/structure, learning about Mork and msf and compacting and X-Mozilla-Status codes, downloading Notepad++ and poking around through some of the files to familiarize myself with their format ... here I am trying to learn how to restore the folders.
Here is where I am at so far: 1. When I went to the Activity Manager, it shows the folders that were deleted, one below the others in a list with the title "Deleted folder foldername" with a dozen different folder names.
2. When I look for the one of the folders that was deleted in the Mail/path/foldername" - I open it (the one without the file extension) in notepad++ and it is empty. There only exists line 1 and there is no text in it (vs. the other folders I check that have the emails in standard From_line format.
This concerns me greatly and leaves me stuck. Did TB actually delete and compact the folder? Are they really deleted, not just X-Mozilla-Status deleted?
3. I don't understand how to restore a folder. I know I can go into a folder and change the X-Mozilla-Status for individual messages - but how to I restore the entire folder? I don't understand how the msf related to the deleted files/folders. It seems like there would be an entry/code somewhere that tells TB - "don't read this entire folder" that I could reverse/edit. I can't figure it out on my own.
4. I understand that, if I delete the foldername.msf file, TB will compact the foldername file. I think I should NOT do this because it will permanently delete the files I want to restore - right?
Any help would be appreciated. I have an unhappy wife. Thank you.
All Replies (3)
The message she garbled I would assume is that the deletions were to large and that the deleted folder would be bypassed. So all the normal recovery from the trash is simply not possible. There is no Thunderbird magic available unfortunately. So your reduced to using operating system undelete software. I have no idea how that will go, but I just downloaded this http://ntfsundelete.com/download and it does appears to do the job, even if the close text is so pale as to be hard to see.
Matt - thank you.
Do you (or anyone!) know of anyone that specializes in data recovery who also happens to be a mozilla fanatic/specialist?
Nope....pretty simple really, run the software and restore anything that has a name that is the same as the folders she deleted. It is click and go stuff, not rocket science. Worst case you undelete last weeks mail or something