"How do I backup my MSN emoticons?" is probably question you'd most likely wonder when you're doing system recovery or reformatting. What most people do is after recovery, they'd go around asking their friends to send them 1 by 1 again. This is alright if you only have 10 or 20 customs emoticons. It'll be a bit troublesome if it the number hits 3 digits.

The problem here we don't know where is out emoticons is stored after we added. Well, here it is:

For Window XP:

C:\Document and Setting\username (folder of your PC username)\Local\Application Data\Microsoft\Messenger\youremail@email.com\ObjectStore\CustomEmoticons\

Or it's something like that I couldn't remember the exact sequence since I'm Vista users.

For Window Vista:

C:\Users\username (folder of your PC username)\AppData\Local\Microsoft\Messenger\youremail@email.com\ObjectStore\CustomEmoticons\

In the folder, the emoticons are stored in .id2 extension. To view it, you need to convert it to a .gif image by simply replace the .id2 with .gif in the file name. e.g. Gl7RuBWIfhHgl3oF7V3A0Z48O80=.id2 will become Gl7RuBWIfhHgl3oF7V3A0Z48O80=.gif

So to back up you just copy out all the files from that folder and after, you have installed your MSN messenger upon recovery, you can paste it back at the same folder. No sweat.