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What is the best method to use to restore from a last backup (Feb), but keep fairly recent emails before it went wrong (today)?

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  • Last reply by christ1

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We have a backup of my wife's Email account in a backup from February. Today our son used the account and clicked compact folder on a popup. Unfortunately it seems to have deleted everything in the Inbox, and some from the Sent, Delete, Drafts and various other folders. My wife needs to get the rest back, Its an iMap account and online there are 3k emails in the Inbox.

Ideally she needs it restored to 9am today. Can anyone suggest how? Or, failing that can anyone suggest a way to use the February backup but retain whats left of the account she currently has, and then work through the Webmail Inbox to restore lost emails between now and Feb?

We have a backup of my wife's Email account in a backup from February. Today our son used the account and clicked compact folder on a popup. Unfortunately it seems to have deleted everything in the Inbox, and some from the Sent, Delete, Drafts and various other folders. My wife needs to get the rest back, Its an iMap account and online there are 3k emails in the Inbox. Ideally she needs it restored to 9am today. Can anyone suggest how? Or, failing that can anyone suggest a way to use the February backup but retain whats left of the account she currently has, and then work through the Webmail Inbox to restore lost emails between now and Feb?

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With IMAP all mail is managed on the server. Have you tried to login to the account via webmail? If you do that, what's left on the server? Does it match what's still visible in Thunderbird?

Data loss upon compacting typically happens when anti-virus software is messing with Thunderbird files. What's your anti-virus software?

Can you post the Troubleshooting Information? Help (Alt-H) - Troubleshooting Information