Salvaging folders in Entourage & some questions.

H

h-bomb

Sorry for the long post and a lot of questions. Response to any of my
questions is appreciated.

I posted late last week with the subject ³Cannot rebuild Entourage X DB² and
got some replies, but not a solution for me. So, I kept on searching.

The DB problem was semi-fixed by moving and renaming and older main identity
database. I wasn¹t involved in that, so I¹m not 100% clear on what exactly
was done. In any case, Entourage was still screwed up, but functioning
enough to work with which was better then not working at all as had been the
case.

What I did was create a new identity, which creates a new DB. I exported
folders by dragging them to the desktop and they become mbox files. The
corrupted DB was so bad, I couldn¹t even view messages and wasn¹t sure what
I was exporting. When I imported the folders/mbox files to the new
identity, all was well.

Here is what I¹m curious about:

1) Could importing folders from the corrupted DB infect the new DB? I¹m
curious to know this because I will be upgrading to Ent. 2004 and don¹t want
the new DB in 2004 to inherit any corruption.

2) Is there is a difference between moving folders onto the desktop creating
the mbox file vs. moving individual messages (blocks of them) into a newly
created folder on the desktop? Moving folders right on to the desktop is so
much easier, but I wonder if there are any cons to doing that? A consultant
had suggested the manual export style.

3) DB size ­ The old DB shows up at being around 2.58GB. After exporting
everything that I could (nearly everything) the new DB is only a few hundred
Megabytes. Cause for concern or an obvious sign that the old DB was
corrupted?


4) My most IMPORTANT question is this one. The only folder I couldn¹t
recover was the Sent folder. When I click on it I get a message ³Could not
open that feature. End of file was reached.² From what I have researched
on this and it wasn¹t a lot yet, am I totally out of luck? Would rebuilding
the desktop help? Is there a utility that can recover damaged folders?

Again, I apologize for the length of the message.
 
M

Michel Bintener

1) Could importing folders from the corrupted DB infect the new DB? I¹m
curious to know this because I will be upgrading to Ent. 2004 and don¹t want
the new DB in 2004 to inherit any corruption.
Click to expand...

I'm not completely sure about this. However, I would in any case recommend
doing an advanced rebuild over a manual import when it comes to fixing a
corrupted database.
2) Is there is a difference between moving folders onto the desktop creating
the mbox file vs. moving individual messages (blocks of them) into a newly
created folder on the desktop? Moving folders right on to the desktop is so
much easier, but I wonder if there are any cons to doing that? A consultant
had suggested the manual export style.
Click to expand...

There is a difference. When you drag the messages to the desktop, they will
show up as .eml files, which is in fact a kind of text format which you can
easily view in text editors. When you drag the folders to the desktop, they
will be converted to .mbox files, the standard mailbox system on Unix
computers (remember, Mac OS X is a Unix system). There should be no problem
with .mbox files, and again, I would prefer using .mbox over .eml when it
comes to backing up/copying e-mails. One of the many reasons is that other
e-mail programs (on the Mac, at least) will recognise the .mbox files, while
they will not recognise messages in .eml, which might be a proprietary
format, I can't remember right now.
3) DB size ­ The old DB shows up at being around 2.58GB. After exporting
everything that I could (nearly everything) the new DB is only a few hundred
Megabytes. Cause for concern or an obvious sign that the old DB was
corrupted?
Click to expand...

Not necessarily. Entourage stores every e-mail in its database, and the
database will not shrink if you delete e-mails. Example: say your database
is 500 MB. If you receive an e-mail of 50MB, your new database size will be
550 MB. Deleting that e-mail should logically return your database to 500
MB, but that's not true for Entourage: the database will stay 550 MB, and
the additional "free" 50 MB space will be filled with new e-mails later on.
The difference between your old database size and the new one simply means
that you've received a lot of e-mails in the past which you then deleted.
4) My most IMPORTANT question is this one. The only folder I couldn¹t
recover was the Sent folder. When I click on it I get a message ³Could not
open that feature. End of file was reached.² From what I have researched
on this and it wasn¹t a lot yet, am I totally out of luck? Would rebuilding
the desktop help? Is there a utility that can recover damaged folders?
Click to expand...

Rebuilding the desktop? In your posts from last week, you said you are using
Mac OS X: rebuilding the desktop is a OS 9 way of solving problems which
does not exist in OS X. So here's what I would do if I were you:
first of all, upgrade to Office X 10.1.6. It won't hurt, and you'll benefit
from a more secure and stable Office suite. Then, repair your disk
permissions with Disk Utility (in the Utilities folder in your Applications
folder). Then, back up any Office identity by copying it to some folder
other than the Microsoft User Data folder. I know you're reluctant to do the
advanced rebuild, but from the problems you're describing, this seems to be
the right way to go. Check out the Entourage Help website
http://www.entourage.mvps.org/database/rebuild.html for more
detailed instructions. Another benefit from rebuilding the database is the
fact that your database will be cleaned up, i.e. it will shrink as the
database utility will delete the "free space" I mentioned before. Note
however that this is an exceptional thing to do, and when things run
smoothly, you should not frequently rebuild the database as a maintenance
routine. That being said, go and try the advanced rebuild, I'm quite
confident that it will solve most, if not all, of your problems. Good luck!

Michel
 
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