I had distinctive different contact lists for MSN messenger and Windows Live Mail used on MSN.  After the conversion some contacts were listed more than once in the "contact" area of Windows Live Mail. 

On my Primary Windows computer I was OK with this. However I have a secondary computer at a vacation home not used since May 2013 which had a lengthy contact list.  In late October this list was truncated and most of the contacts PC have disappeared, leaving only previous MSN Messenger contacts.

I need to recover all the contacts I had in May.  I am also fearful that when I restart my primary computer in December its contact list may become a casualty.

Although I can login to the outlook.com interface I strongly prefer to use the Windows Live Mail interface for email communication.  I suspect that this problem is related to the fact I have several MSN email accounts ( @MSN, @Hotmail, @live) as well as MSN Messenger, and somehow contact truncation occurred.   No email as lost.

*** Email address is removed for privacy ***

Add:  I have backups on a Windows Home Server and have located a backup file called Users/my name/AppData/Local/Microsoft/WindowsLiveContacts/{id number}/DBstore/contacts.edb.  The MODIFICATION date shown is several years before the last contact entry of contacts made on this computer.  (There are 3 other files, contacts.pat, dbstore.ini and edb.chk here as well, and a Backup and a Logfile directory.  Is there a different place where more recent contacts for Windows Live Mail are stored, and if so where?