>> Thanks, but changing the OS is not an option; I'm running this on a
>> corporate system.
OS> Well, IMO there's nothing in this world that makes Win98 run smoothly
OS> and undisturbed under all circumstances. Same goes for NT (probably
OS> for any OS if you take it seriously), but it's much (ahem, _MUCH_)
OS> more stable.
I have completely different experience, both at home and at work. My
Win98 machines seem to run forever, but my WinNT machine at home and
the NT machines of the artists around me, running Photoshop and 3D
Studio all day, crash every day.
Of course, I'm the type who likes to restart my Windows machines
almost daily anyway. My Linux firewall at home has recently reached
an uptime greater than any Windows machine is capable of (does anyone
know if they fixed the 47-day crash built into Windows for W2k?), but
then we're talking real operating systems that were not designed by
the almighty dollar.
OS> Anyway, defragging your drives regularly and making sure you have
OS> more RAM than you need most of the time will certainly do good.
While these are good things to do, they do not cause day-to-day
problems with modern operating systems (even Windows is part of this
group).
>> As to the power supply, I don't think that was the problem--it was a
>> system freeze-up, it wasn't a case of losing power.
OS> Cases of nearly-losing power can cause effects like what you
OS> described. We've had that on database systems which even continued
OS> running, but was losing data nevertheless due to sub-optimal power
OS> supply.
A power conditioner/backup is also a good thing, and I've noticed that
TB! doesn't actually need the database around to download mail (it
just complains that it can't find it and locks up presumably when it
goes to write), so I wonder if you powered off right before the end of
downloading mail if you'd lose it all. IOW, if you had a crash or
something during a download...
I don't know what state TB keeps its database while its running, but
it could well do "strange" things to it that would cause ruining of
the database during a crash.
Anyhow, choice of OS makes no difference with the sorts of issues that
Oliver brings up. If your power sags then any OS will likely go down.
If there are software issues, then it doesn't much matter what OS
you're on either.
On getting your mail back, your only option is to restore from backup.
Doesn't matter if you don't do backups, 'cause that's your only option
in either case. If you don't do backups, perhaps this will show you
why you need to do them. If individual messages are gone, then
they're gone. It would be a different issue entirely if an entire
mailbox was empty, since that might be caused by a simple-to-fix
problem with the database. However, it should be obvious if some
messages are there and some aren't, well, they're gone...
Just realized, if you haven't done a purge/compress yet, there might
be hope. However I have no idea how to do that and I don't know that
any information on the database format has been issued. You could try
copying off your database to a safe place, and open that in an editor
and just browse it as text; you might have some luck piecing together
emails.
g'luck,
-tom!
--
Hopin' this said *something* useful, [EMAIL PROTECTED] out.
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