quote:
Originally posted by dkshao
unfortunatly i didnt know about the backup option untill after i formatted and reinstalled, i did however back up my entire hard drive before i formatted, is there somewhere i can recover the custom names?
Only if you have a very good knowledge of the registry, how it stores its data and how to retrieve it. And only if you also backuped Windows system files (which is not always done automatically and highly depends on your definition of "backup")...
Thus you could open the system file which contains the registry data with a special program and then you can get back the custom names by reading out the appropiate keys, but even then there is no direct way of knowing which custom name belongs to which contact (as the contact's emails are stored as hashes in the registry).
Though, if you're in luck and have taken a true backup (1 on 1 image) you could also try to restore it and run Plus! again and save the preferences that way.
So, in short and with the details you gave: restore the entire HDD to is previous state, run Messenger with Messenger Plus! and store the preferences.