Importing an Entourage 2008 database file

[adamboettiger]

Version: 2008
Operating System: Mac OS X 10.5 (Leopard)
Processor: Intel
Email Client: Exchange

Have a co-worker who took his laptop to IS (who doesn't really support Macs). IS backed up his data to an external drive and wiped the drive and did a clean reinstall of OS X.

So the old Entourage 2008 database file is on his external drive now. It was NOT exported properly using the archive process, but was simply copied to the external drive as a file.

All documentation I am seeing says that one cannot import a 2008 database to Entourage 2008. It has to be an older archive file to import. In this instance all we're trying to do is recover his email.

I've tried overwriting the new database file with the old one from the external hard drive and when I do that Entourage won't open the identity.

Any ideas?

I realize that if it were an MBX file or an RGE file I would not have this problem, but I don't have the luxury of working with that due to the data not being properly exported in the first place.

Thanks in advance for any ideas.

 

[Corentin Cras-Méneur]

I've tried overwriting the new database file with the old one from the
external hard drive and when I do that Entourage won't open the
identity.

That should have worked. Are you sure the new computer has a version of
Office that's equivalent or more recent than the old one??

Corentin

 

[adamboettiger]

Had not thought to check that. We are checking for updates now and will retry it. Thanks for the idea.

 

[adamboettiger]

The reason why it was not reading the database file was indeed what you suggested, which was that the version of Entourage 2008 was older than the backed up file. We ran the auto-updater to bring Entourage 2008 up to the most recent version and then overwrote the database file and it worked. Thanks!