I have a friend who had to move to Win8 due to his PC burning out. He successfully moved all his data from the old drive to the new system including his Windows Live Mail and including his contacts and all was well for a couple of months. Now all of a sudden he has lost his Contacts - the whole thing is blank. Unfortunately he cannot pinpoint exactly when the loss may have been incurred but equally he cannot recollect any particular problem with his email setup that could possibly have been related to the loss.

He is running Win8 and Windows Live Mail Version 2012 (Build 16.4.3508.0205) so its pretty up to date. He does not have a hotmail.com or similar Microsoft email address, but a Yahoo one and another local ISP supplied web mail one. Both of these are included in the Windows Live Mail list of accounts and are synched with all the time. We believe the Contact list (including Groups) was stored on the local machine however despite being able to find lots of contacts.edb files we have so far been unable to determine which one might be the 'lost' one.

Given the above configuration can anyone point us at where we should look to find what we think must have been a locally stored contacts file, so that hopefully we can somehow point WLM to it again?

Bernard