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30 Folders Lost
 
All my folders in one account are now missing except inbox,outbox, sent and trash.

I pressed Ctrl-Alt-Shift-L and it finds nothing.

I had installed antispam sniper and it seemed to be working fine. THen I was reading emails.

The program crashed, and when started again, the error message said Cannot access directory C:\\USER\APPDATA\Roaming\THEBAT\BRAINSTORMERY\INBOX

THe inbox now has no messages in it.

I love the program and its filtering is great, but I've used Outlook for many many years and it never lose folders like this. (a lot of bad things about outlook, but at least my email was always safe, even when I had HUGE email files.  ANy ideas how I can get these folders back.

Is this a common problem?

I have a backup that is a day old, but even so I have some important business emails that are now lost.

I'm not a computer newby, have been using computers since the Commodore Vic 20 lol... all I did was read emails when it happened.

I'm running Vista, latest updates, Bat latest update, AVG latest updates.

THanks much
Rick
 
AL though Bat can't find the folders, they are there when I go into Explorer, with numbers big enough that I think they have the emails in them.

I saw somewhere that there is a repair function or something like that?

Rick
 
Hello,

Did you try to restore?

Tools >>> Restore >>> Add...

Obviously, you will get back the data which existed at the time of the backup.
 
Over the years of using The Bat! I've also experienced lost folders.  Usually this happens when a computer crashes while The Bat! is engaged in some sort of operation. It's my experience that once a folders .tbb and .tbi files become corrupted, there's no possible recovery.

One thing that MIGHT work is opening the .tbb files with Notepad.  IF it's readable, you can copy and paste your messages.  But, I suspect that if The Bat! can't read it, then the file is unreadable by other programs as well.

To combat the sudden loss of folders, I do an automatic backup every six hours. Not a guarantee, but better than nothing.
 
Rick,

Over the years I've heard more people complaining about lost folders, so it isn't the exceptional case  I'd like to say it is, but it isn't that regular an occasion either. I know lots of long time TB users who've never encountered this problem.
The cases I've heard about lost or corrupted folders generally mentioned computer crashes during folder maintenance and that's a critical moment.

Rdean's suggestion of backups every six hours seems overly careful to me but for some it might work.

To prevent lost folders it would be enough to store a copy of the account.flb file outside your message base, every account has its own account.flb file and your mail directory has one too. The important data in those files are the folder structure and the folder properties (like templates and such), so you'd need to create a new copy for safekeeping whenever you change those. It also points to the last read message in the folders and that's the reason that it easily corrupts during a crash, it's continuously being written to.

Sacles' suggestion to restore a backup is a nice one too, though he points to the obvious problem that you only restore the data until the last backup. But you've got all data on your hard disk. What you could do is to create a copy of your current mail directory, that's complete execept for the reference to the used folders.
Now you restore your backup. That will restore the references to your folders. Now you restore the copy of your mail directory with the exception of your account.flb files.
Now you should have everything back.

You mentioned in another topic that you're using AVG, but not its plugin, I'd advice to use the plugin (AVG setup installs it automatically as soon as it recognizes TB)
I don't know how stable your anti spam plugin is, especially with Vista. Personally I've never tried an ant spam plugin I really liked.
__________________________________
I'm just a user of The Bat! I don't work for Ritlabs.
 
What I forgot to mention is that when you're using an encrypted message base you've got to ignore the (empty) account.flb files, but need to use the account.efb files, with an unencrypted message base there are no .efb files.
__________________________________
I'm just a user of The Bat! I don't work for Ritlabs.
 
Thanks for all the messages trying to help.

I used restore, and went back to the day before. That got the messages back, but the program CANNOT backup that account now. IT backs up the other 3 accounts fine.

The computer didn't crash, but TB did. I got the important messages out by having word open the message file, so that's no longer an issue.

Now I'm trying to.

1. Get TB where it can backup again. Like your idea of frequent daily backups. But when I use restore, i get messages and then NO WAY TO back up the database. HOW can I restore TB so it will back up again.

Roelof, I didn't follow what you were telling me try with restoring things. I found the flb files. Wouldn't having a complete copy of the entire bat folder do the same thing? Can you break that down a bit more please. Is this a way to get TB where it can back up again?

2. Figure out how to prevent it from happening again. I don't know which variable is the culprit. IS it newly installing AVG, or newly installed antispam sniper, or something else? (spell checker add to dictionary did not work - and common filters worked sporadically, so was BAT installation corrupt. I reinstalled Bat, but no change.

3. Find a solution to my spam. But that's a separate problem.
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