See www.oehelp.com/OETips.aspx#2 for issues related to the compaction
problem.

See point 4 on that page for message recovery techniques. In cases such as
yours, you might be able to recover the messages using the extract from disk
feature of DBXpress, as the messages are probably no longer in the files.

steve

"moorgain" wrote in message
...
Good morning Bruce
Hoping you can help a illiterate novice computer user. Obviously there has
been an upgrade because I have been getting a 'compact your files' message
popping up every time I touch my OE. Unfortunately in a hurry the other
day I
clicked yes instead of cancel and all the files I had been keeping the
inmportant stuff in have disappeared. Can you tell me in words of 1
syllable
where they have gone and how or if I can get them back
Thank you
Christine

"Bruce Hagen" wrote:

No. Hardly a day goes by without someone posting that OE compacted and
now
their messages are gone. And did they have them backed up? Of course not.
Now they have to purchase a retrieval tool, spend possibly hours, and
still
may not get all the messages back.

Finally, MS decided to *hold people's hands* and do the backup for them.
IMHO, one of the good *big brother* things they have done.

This article explains why messages may be lost:
http://support.microsoft.com/kb/918069/en-us

And this explains the patch.
http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/d...DisplayLang=en

You could use a program like Disk Clean to empty the Recycle Bin, and
other
things, at startup, but that defeats the purpose of this patch.

Be greatful for small blessings.
--
Bruce Hagen
MS MVP - Outlook Express
~IB-CA~

"Sandy J" wrote in message
...
After the latest updates I find that when I compact files that the
backup
files from all my OE folders are sent to the recycle bin... I'm
wondering
if there is a way to just have them deleted without going to the
recycle
bin?

Sandy