DAMN!
I LOST MY WHOLE MAILBOX!
Yeah, everything which wasn't in the backup I made about two or three years ago when I switched from Netscape 4.51 to Mozilla 1.0.
I guess the damage to about 300 - 500 MB of mails, including those fun-mails containing PowerPoint presentations, picture shows, flash movies, etc.
Gone... Forever...
How could that happen?
Well, I decided do re-install my Win2K because I suspected some hidden errors in my NTFS-filesystem, which weren't corrected by CHKDSK.
I had quite some drawbacks, I couldn't connect to the Internet ("Permission denied" when trying to start the RAS-Connection Manager Service, OS lockdowns, etc.
So I wanted to make a complete copy of my Win2K HDD on my larger HDD (I had enough room left there). During the copy I got access problems, because of open files.
I decided to copy the directory with the open files (of course the "Application Data" directory) later after the rest of the HDD had found a new home.
But after about 45 minutes (yes, it took that long to copy the enourmous ammount of files) I had forgotten about that directory.
Unfortunately Mozilla stores its whole profile data there.
Then I started the installation of the new Win2K instance and chose to completely generate a new NTFS filesystem (to not accidentially carry over the suspected errors) and wipe out all of the previous data.
And when I wanted to reinstall Mozilla and copy over my old profile... bam!... it's not there anymore...
F***.
Everyone knows, how important regular backups are, after they lost all of their data.
What can I remember, what was in there?
Hm, all my bookmarks (quite a lot), my complete archive of some mailinglists (one with over 10.000 posts), my school graduation preparations, all mails from my former class collegues with their contact addresses and phone numbers (damn, not these...), my whole address book with many developer contacts, passwords, logins, etc., etc.
Silly me!