OK, so I get a call from a coworker a couple days ago- He has sub-folders to store Outlook emails. Apparently, some of those folders were located under the trash folder for quite some time. He decided to delete his trash, and those folders went, too! What are my chances of recovering them? When you delete the trash, it asks if you want to permanently delete them, and they are not in the recycle bin. He is running Windows 7 Pro. Windows backup is set up and does daily backups of his computer. The same (offsite/local) company that hosts our website is also our email server. Server emails are deleted after a month- much of the email content is older, so recovery through the server wouldn't work, either.

I went to 'Backup and restore' on his computer yesterday and tried to restore his files. I chose 'Restore files and folders' and selected a backup from a few days ago before he deleted those emails. I watched as it was restoring and it seemed to restore a bunch of .jpg's and some desktop folders, but the deleted Outlook folders didn't restore.

What next? Were those 'Outlook trash folder' items getting backed up? Do I need to restore differently? We do have a PC Guru that we call from time to time- maybe it's time to call him?

good luck -jim