Time Machine and Entourage

NAP MBP 1 · Jan 16th, 2009, 12:43 PM

My Mac Book Pro runs Time Machine and backs up to an external hard drive.

I also run Entourage and keep all of my email in subject specific folders. I am missing some emails and am trying to find where these would be found on the back-up drive. I have searched without success both here and Microsoft.

Thanks for the help.

Norm

Macaholic · Jan 16th, 2009, 03:10 PM

Unfortunately, Microsoft uses a monolithic data file for ALL of Entourage's data. As far as I understand it this presents a double-jeopardy with regards to Time Machine:

1) As Entourage uses a single, big (monolithic) file that contains every event, contact, note or received one email, you cannot extract one email, note or event out of it via Time Machine. The OS X Finder -- and Time Machine -- sees ALL your Entourage data as ONE file. You could restore that one file, big file, but you will replace ALL new data created or email received within Entourage since the last Time Machine backup. This is a big problem that basically renders Time Machine USELESS for Entourage users. This problem also affects Mac OS X "packages" (which are basically locked folders), such as iMovie HD (pre the current version) project files and garageband project files.

2) As Time Machine checks the date modified value for a file to see if it has changed since the last backup, your ENTIRE monolithic Entourage database will be backed up even if you changed but one note, contact or whatever. And, as Time Machine keeps regressive copies of your data -- previous versions of files -- it is keeping multiple copies of useless Entourage data files on your Time Machine drive. If your Entourage database file is over a gig in size, you can well imagine that these are uselessly hogging up large tracts of disk space.

What I suggest you do is add your Entourage data file folder to Time Machine's ignore list and create a special folder on your TM BU disk for manual, drag-and-drop backups of your Entourage data file.

All of this is one of the reasons I migrated from Entourage to OS X Mail/iCal/Address Book, which all work perfectly with Time Machine. There are some aspects of Entourage I miss but such is life.

Gizmo · Jan 16th, 2009, 04:06 PM

Couldn't you rename your current Entourage database, recover the old one, save the emails to the desktop then delete the recovered database and re-rename your original database?

	Quote:			Originally Posted by NAP MBP 1
	My Mac Book Pro runs Time Machine and backs up to an external hard drive. I also run Entourage and keep all of my email in subject specific folders. I am missing some emails and am trying to find where these would be found on the back-up drive. I have searched without success both here and Microsoft. Thanks for the help. Norm

Macaholic · Jan 16th, 2009, 04:24 PM

He sure can!

Might take a while to root through TM's multiple Entourage database backups to find the right ones b ut he could do it.

While there, the OP might as well delete all previous backups of the database. That could free up a bunch of space...

On 2nd thought, let's see if I get any confirmation of my original post from others. It would be a biggie if I was wrong (don't think I am, however).

Jan 16th, 2009, 08:22 PM

You could also make a new identity within Office and load the restored Entourage file into it to do some searching but if you haven't tried yet first do a rebuild of the Entourage database, which will sometimes resolve things like this.