Hello dartraiden, thanks for your reply. I will update MSN to dummy to keep contact histories.
I do have some backups, although I disabled the autobackups module because it produced truncated backups and stalled Miranda. I'll check to see if it's working for me now.
As for ICQ, I believe I always update almost immediately, but I switched to stable because I had db issues with the beta versions of Miranda. Could you point me to a description of how to restore histories and contacts without breaking the database or bloating it with duplicates?
A new problem: a power shortage must have done some serious damage to my database! This happened right now. I restored my newest backup (from 4 April 2020), but some old messages in the Facebook account now show strings like STK{369239263222822} in place of smilies. More importantly, all the messages from 4 April to today are lost to Miranda, which isn't getting them back from the FB server. Is there something I can do to fix this?
Thanks again for your help.