PC World Forums: Tring to retreive saved email after doing a Master system recovery? - PC World Forums

I have had to do a full system recovery using the master cd recovery disks after my system crashed, since doing the recovery i have lost all the email i had saved on Outlook Express and One Note, Is there anyway of finding and retrieving this email from my system

You can peacefully forget about Onenote ...Its gone for sure ....

But you might have a slight change to get your saved email by calling the tech. support from email server for help ....

Never seen anybody done it ............But then again ..its worth a try ......

Thanks for your help.

Basically true, but not completely true.

There is a slight (i.e. very, very, very, very small) chance that you could still recover data from the disk. The more you use it and save more data and install programs, the smaller that chance remains. You would need to try some data recovery software (you can try the demo of this program...it will supposedly tell you if there is data it believes it can recovery...http://www.prosofteng.com/products/datarescuepc.php?PHPSESSID=a026935abdbae90fa10fcb66eb6779f4) to see if there is anything to try to recover. Chances are at this point that you will have no luck...you would have been in a much better position if you had tried this prior to doing the recovery.

Your other option would be to try a data recovery service. They tend to have much better odds at recovering data that conventional recovery programs. The only really problem is that they tend to cost a LOT (typically at least several hundred dollars if not more than $1000). And you could end up spending all the money to get nothing.

I will not preach too much from my soapbox other than to note my signature line below...