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Millions of users around the world utilizes MSN messenger, an application for connecting with others online. One of the most common ways of expressing your feelings online is to make use of emoticons. While the default emoticons for MSN messenger are enough for some users, other users like to personalize their utility by using custom emoticons.

Okay, so you’ve got some really cool custom emoticons and want to save them to an external storage device in the event of a system failure. So what do you do? Well, it’s pretty simple. Just follow this little guide and you’ll be backing-up your emoticons in less than a minute.

You will first need to enable viewing of hidden files and folders. To do this on:

Windows Vista

1. Click [Start] or Windows Logo orb
2. Go to Control Panel
3. Click classic view on the left panel, then click on Folder Options
4. From the Folder Options pop up window, click on the View tab,
5. Under ‘Hidden files and folders‘, select ‘show hidden files and folders‘
6. Click [Ok]

Now that you can view your hidden files and folders, time to back-up those emoticons.

1. Click [Start] or Windows Logo orb
2. Go to: My Computer\Local Disk or C Drive\Users\YourName\AppData\Local\Microsoft\Messenger\you@hotmail/live.com\ObjectStore\CustomEmoticons
3. Copy and paste all the files in this folder to a back-up location, that’s it!

Windows XP

1. From the tools menu in Windows Explorer click Folder Options
2. From the Folder Options pop up window, click on the View tab,
3. Under ‘Hidden files and folders‘, select ‘show hidden files and folders‘
4. Click [Ok]

Now that you can view your hidden files and folders, time to back-up those emoticons.

1. Click [Start] or Windows Logo
2. Go to: My Computer\Local Disk or C:\Documents and Settings\Owner\Local Settings\Application Data\Microsoft\Messenger\you@hotmail/live.com\ObjectStore\CustomEmoticons
3. Copy and paste all the files in this folder to a back-up location, that’s it!

In the event of a system failure where you had to re-install your OS, therefore also having to re-install a fresh copy of MSN messenger, simply copy the files from your back-up device, then return to the CustomEmoticons folder, paste your files, and re-start MSN messenger if it was already initialized.

If your system crashed before you could’ve made a back-up, then according to your re-install method, you’ll find a WindowsOld folder located on your local disk drive. Just open this folder and follow the same steps above.

What if your system is unbootable, or you did a re-install, basically, what if there was no access to a back-up to actually do a restore? Well, there might be some hope, software likeActive @ File Recovery might be able to find these files for you, that’s if the location data sector wasn’t written over by new data. Anyhow, this method goes beyond the scope of this post but in any order, it’s still helpful to know that there’s an alternative for the problem.