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Hope I can get some help. Last week we upgraded a shared hosting to cloud hosting on Bluehost. One of the IMAP email accounts had two super important folders with dozens of subfolders and thousands of messages that suddenly disappeared after the migration on both Outlook 2010 and his iPhone. All the other messages (and accounts) are fine.
First, BH support stated they could see the folders on the backup (but I'm not the one that talked to them), assured us they would restore them, but it never happened. Today they told me that they're unable to locate any of the folders or messages on any of their servers or backups. They basically said we must have deleted them prior to the migration, but that's not possible.
Can anyone help me understand how this could have happened?
Also, any guidance or suggestions would be very much appreciated. The emails contain all the jobs and bids for this project manager.
keenan
Posted 2015-09-14T00:05:49.683
Reputation: 11
Only Bluehost can resolve this for your (unless you have your own email backups). – DavidPostill – 2015-09-14T12:06:34.700
Thanks DavidPostill - I spoke with the Tech Supervisor at Bluehost today who reviewed the oldest backup made before the migration. He said the two folders where there, but empty (all subfolders gone). He thinks that these custom folders were set up to store the messages on the devices, not back to the server, so when the migration was completed the email directory structure was updated without them. So basically they are still in Outlook just not visible and should be recoverable. This actually makes sense to me, but have no idea how to go about restoring them. Any help you might offer? – keenan – 2015-09-14T16:00:23.453
Like I said above, do you have your own email backups? – DavidPostill – 2015-09-14T17:10:21.767
Probably not, but I will check. I thought that they might be in a data file within the Outlook application. Thanks again! – keenan – 2015-09-14T17:34:36.267
Understanding nuances of Outlook 2010 with IMAP email might be worth a read. – DavidPostill – 2015-09-14T17:37:41.267
If you did backup you will probably have a
– DavidPostill – 2015-09-14T17:41:39.230.pstfile around somewhere. You can read mail back in from this file. See https://iris.eecs.berkeley.edu/15-faq/15-software/outlook-backup_email.htmlThanks again, there is no backup. The client stated that one day the hosting service said there were able to locate the subfolders on a backup, the next day they said they could not. Still don't understand how that could have happened. Looking into recovery options. – keenan – 2015-09-15T22:23:13.790