I have followed the Backup and Restore procedure from a laptop.
I backed up to a USB hard drive using the Backup and Restore Centre. I needed to re-set the factory defaults on the Acer and have since restarted my Windows Mail programme. I have now run the restore from the Windows Backup and Restore Centre but no emails or contacts have been restored!
This is a serious situation.
I have looked at the Backup folder on the hard drive and I can see it is split into 13 files - further than that I have not gone.
I don't think that Windows Mail data is included in standard backups. I use Outlook and I have to manually specify Windows to backup the data files, it does not do it by default.
Unless you have changed it, Windows Mail data files are stored in the following folder:
C:\Users\[username]/AppData/Local/Microsoft/Windows Mail
If you restore your backup to a folder, then you could try navigating to the above directory.
I'm sorry to say that I don't think you'll be able to get these details back There is a chance, but if I'm going to tell it how it is, the chance is very small.