Address Book Losing Data

[Katie Harper]

Forgive cross postings. There seem to be 2 groups for Entourage for Mac.

Two of my address book groups have lost some listings recently. Rebuilding
the database has no effect. I have the data elsewhere (in my old
Outlook folder, for one), although I have no idea how to retreive just
those portions (any ideas?) I need to find out what is causing this
to prevent it in future. I don't know if it's related, but I'm also
experiencing slow operation in general, erratic operation in other
software (In DEsign for one) and really weird mouse movements from
time to time. Restarting seems to help. I'm using OSX 10.2.6 and
Office 10.1.1 and a logitech optical mouse. Are all these symptoms of
disk fragmentation? Should I run Norton Speed Disk? I have heard bad
things about that in the past. Any other ideas? Thanks!

 

[Paul Berkowitz]

Forgive cross postings. There seem to be 2 groups for Entourage for Mac.

This is the correct one. The other one is deprecated.

Two of my address book groups have lost some listings recently. Rebuilding
the database has no effect. I have the data elsewhere (in my old
Outlook folder, for one), although I have no idea how to retreive just
those portions (any ideas?) I need to find out what is causing this
to prevent it in future. I don't know if it's related, but I'm also
experiencing slow operation in general, erratic operation in other
software (In DEsign for one) and really weird mouse movements from
time to time. Restarting seems to help. I'm using OSX 10.2.6 and
Office 10.1.1 and a logitech optical mouse. Are all these symptoms of
disk fragmentation? Should I run Norton Speed Disk? I have heard bad
things about that in the past. Any other ideas? Thanks!

This doesn't make much sense. Groups don't lose "listings" just like that.
There's one way it could happen: if you dragged or "auto-completed" names of
contacts in(to) the group, so that they appeared with "little man" contact
icons rather than typing out every letter of the (name and) email address so
that they appeared with the yellow "@" icon, then if you later delete the
contacts from the main Address Book they will also disappear from the groups
they were in. OR - if you delete all email addresses from a contact who
happens to be in a group, then that contact will disappear from the group.
Could you have done this? Groups are for emailing - you cannot have a
non-email contact in a group. If you later add an email address back to the
contact, you'd have to add it to the group again. As long as you don't do
this, nor deleting contacts, in future, this problem won't recur. Either
leave them all as contacts with email addresses in the Address Book, or make
them typed-out entries with yellow @ icons in the groups.

If by any chance you're hoping to make groups to include contacts without
email addresses, what you really want is a custom view of contacts of a
particular category instead. Apply a category to contacts and make a custom
view for contacts of that category. It will have the advantage of being
dynamic - any time you assign that category to another contact it will
automatically get added to the custom view.

(Theoretically, I suppose it's not impossible that weird things like lost
group members could happen as a result of database corruption, but I've
never, ever herd of it happening. If somehow that happened, doing an
Advanced Rebuild would stop it from recurring.)


--
Paul Berkowitz
MVP Entourage

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[Katie Harper]

Paul: Thank you for your response. I'm afraid that my Groups did
indeed just "lose" the listings. It happened twice with two different
groups. What you say below makes sense, but I did not delete any
listings from any part of the address book. So I'm left with the idea
of some type of data corruption. Since other anamolies are occuring
with my machine, it's possible that something is going. As you so
correctly point out, backup is the only answer. I used to back up to
CD on a fairly regular basis, but since buying a new monitor my
external CD burner won't work. Anything plugged into the Firewire port
causes the video to disappear (I know, more voodoo...) Someday, when I
get some free time, I'll be able to find the solution to all this.
Meanwhile, I hobble along, trying sacrafices to different gods...
Anyway, I was able to recreate my group by importing contacts from my
older Outlook folder. That brought back the vast majority of hames on
that list, and I can add the new ones, a much smaller list.

Thanks again.

Katie Harper