Windows Mail Restore Issues

I keep my Windows Mail message store on a data directory on my F drive. My email is IMAP. I back up the directory every night.
Today I accidentally deleted an IMAP folder and all my emails were gone. I thought it was no problem as I had backups, but I was wrong. Recreating the directory on the IMAP system (empty of course) and restoring the backup .eml files to that directory did nothing. The folder was still empty. What was worse was that when I restarted Windows Mail my IMAP email was all gone. The account had been deleted. Fortunately I had a backup of the .IAF file and recreated it. I spent hours downloading all my message headers. I rebooted again and found all the deleted emails (that I had copied to the new directory in the data store) in a 'Recovery Messages' folder shown in my local folders (for a POP3 account that I have with my ISP). I dragged them to the recreated IMAP directory and voila! All messages were there.
What a mess. I was lucky. Taking data backups does not necessarily guarantee safety. Hope that helps somebody.