I lost my Oblivion installation in a hard drive failure over a year ago, though my saves were safe on another HD. I recently reinstalled it on a new HD and included most of the mods I was using in my most recent saves, including the same version of ArmoryLab I had been using. When I load a previous save, most of the items I had stored in other locations, including mod-added houses, were still there. Everything I had in ArmoryLab was gone. I used the most recent Wrye Bash for the installation and rebuilt a bashed patch. Is there any way to restore ArmoryLab so that the contents that were there in the old save are still there?

Make sure that your load order is exactly the same. Use Bash's Diff Masters function on your old save to make sure you have not overlooked anything.

I did leave some of the old mods out of the installation and add a few new ones. I did use the BASH masters list to put the ArmoryLab files in the exact numerical load order positions they had occupied in the old saves. I was using one of the modular ArmoryLab versions, probably 3.4.1. I tried that version as well as 31, 33, and 35, all with the same result: loss of all my stored items. I did rebuild the Bashed patch after each version change.

What is "BASH masters list"? Your load order only consists of active plugins, the ones which Bash puts the two hex numbers next to. The information in the save file corresponds exactly. If the formIDs in the plugin, as the game sees them, have changed, the game will either trash the information or pick up some other random item for which the ID now corresponds, neither of which is preferable.

In the Bash saves tab, if you click on a save file the far right frame in the Bash window displays a list that's supposed to show all the esm & esp files that were active in that save, with color coding to show which ones correspond to files in your current Data folder. It also shows original load order (in hex numbers) and load order of active mods in the current setup. The same info, excluding current load order, is shown by List Masters in the File menu. All the ArmoryLab 3 series versions could be updated to another 3 series without loss of contents. I did that for several versions in my old, lost installation.

That is really odd unless the save does not contain the data anymore. I wonder if that Bash stats feature, for saves, shows that sort of information...

The Bash stats reports for my old saves showed a load position of 03 for the ArmoryLab esm. Putting it in that position in my current installation still did not restore the items I had stored there. I wonder whether this problem is unique to this mod or whether it may be a more general problem when old saves are used in reinstallations of Oblivion?