How to recover AOL 6.0 Personal Filing Cabinet

[BOZ]

well, my copy of AOL 6.0 finally crapped out on me. the hard drive has been dying a slow death for a long time now, and every once in awhile i lose the ability to use a program, and this time it was AOL's turn. yes, i should have upgraded awhile ago, but what can i say: when something isn't broken why fix it?

but, now, it's broken. one of the main reasons i use AOL is because of the personal filing cabinet. it saves every e-mail i send and receive, which is particularly useful to me.

i just tried to install AOL 9.0, which doesn't seem to want to be compatible with the setup i have right now (probably because of DLL issues... just another reminder that i need to reformat the HD, or just get a new one). it tried to recognize the 6.0 as an upgradable version, but it would not do that. i was hoping it would, if for no other reason than to save the PFC.

so, do you know of any way to rescue the contents of my PFC? to at least get the content and e-mail addresses so that i can save anything important enough that i find in there?

 

[IronWolf]

so, do you know of any way to rescue the contents of my PFC? to at least get the content and e-mail addresses so that i can save anything important enough that i find in there?

I don't have an answer for you really, AOL does things in a pretty proprietary way in most cases and I haven't seen or worked with an AOL install for many years. But... I would think this is a common question that their support might be able to walk you through. They should know where the data is kep in the old AOL folder and might be able to walk you through importing it into the newer version.

And as a side note, and not being familiar with what exactly the filing cabinet does, but just about all modern day email programs saves all of your sent and received email by default. Outlook, Outlook Express, Thunderbird, Eudora, Pine, etc all do this.

 

[BOZ]

true, but i'm not paying for the AOL since it's my dad's account.

i was able to open the 36MB file in word, and i can see a lot of text in there when i scroll through all the weird characters; if i can't fix the problem, i might just be able to make sense of it all that way (maybe).

 

[Glyfair]

Well, you could try downloading AOL 5.0 and see if maybe that works. I don't see a version of 6.0 online right now, but you can find 5.0 at http://www.oldversion.com/program.php?n=aol

Edit:

or get AOL 6.0 at

http://www.download.com/America-Online-AOL-/3000-2104_4-3286967.html

 

[BOZ]

hey, cool, maybe if i can get 6.0 working again, that would save my PFC, and then i can always upgrade to a new version of AOL later. thanks!