Computer Trouble – Update

Apart from your computer crashing there is not much worse that can happen. On Tuesday I really had a nightmare day. I had installed CCleaner quite recently. On Monday that program – the world’s leading PC Cleaner and Optimization Tool and according to my host overestimated – had announced that its free software was infected with malware. And of course I had downloaded it in this period. No doubt about it that I immediately removed it. A first check on malware didn’t show that much on my computer. But on Tuesday morning I ran Spybot – Search and Destroy on both my laptop and my computer to be sure. And then it all the ‘fun’ started.

Nothing of importance seemed to be found. But it turned out Spybot had removed a file that is needed by a computer. Instead of checking online first what to do against it, I removed the software. Then I ran system recovery, setting back the computer and laptop with one week. It worked fine on the laptop, which I don’t use very often. But on the computer it was a nightmare. I had done it before and nothing ever happened with my mailbox, I never lost anything. But of course I should have remembered I only installed three new email addresses in the software which I use for placing e-mail on my computer. And I had moved all old mail from the past six years or so to these new ones. System recovery worked fine, removed CCleaner again, ran malware remover once again, and my almost seven-year-old computer works great again. But as you can imagine: I had to reinstall all the email addresses and all the saved e-mails from the past were literally gone.

Then I synchronized my logins on the laptop and computer, and guess, I somehow managed to do that the other way around. And as the list on the laptop was empty, all logins were then gone too. Clearly if something has gone wrong, you shouldn’t continue trying to do anything else but normal stuff.

Anyway I think nothing highly important has disappeared. And I did save a somewhat older list with logins elsewhere on my computer. Although that list is not fully complete, I hope I can recover everything that is really important. I am now thinking of a way to make sure something like this can’t happen again. But let’s be honest, I haven’t had such an empty mailbox for years!

UPDATE 26 September! Just managed to find the Mailbox of Thunderbird in my Explorer – reachable apparently via Thunderbird only – and managed to find out how to transfer these files back into my mailbox so I can read them again. Bad thing is: now I have to start selecting the mail again and see what I want to keep and can throw away.