yet another Entourage database disaster

D

dano

Checked my Address Book (Entourage 11.2.5, OSX 10.4.7) this morning and
there were only 3 contacts - all with my own name. Which means that over
800 contacts - all the info of all people and companies that I interact
with and were present prior - are all gone.

The last I used the address book was a few days ago and everything was
there. And I have not removed any.

I ran a simple database diagnosis and Database Utility said everything
was okay.

Ran a full database rebuild and got up to 172 contacts - nowhere near
what was present before the meltdown.

Restored from a database backup of August 14, but that means I get to
lose over three months of accumulated information in contacts, calendar
and address book (down to 780 contacts now).

I know there is nothing anybody here on this forum can do about this wrt
offering advice on recovery, but I just wanted to post this as a data
point on:

1) the fragility of the Entourage database
2) the ineffectiveness (total uselessness?) of the Database Utility
mechanism
3) the error of making the database a closed, proprietary format
4) the importance of having regular (and especially) incremental backups
 
D

Diane Ross

Do you have syncservices enabled? Losing contacts is not a normal database
corruption problem.

--
Diane Ross, Microsoft Mac MVP
Entourage Help Page
<http://www.entourage.mvps.org/>
The Entourage Blog lists the EHP as one of the top five Microsoft Entourage
resources.
 
D

dano

Diane Ross said:
Do you have syncservices enabled?
Nope.

Losing contacts is not a normal database
corruption problem.
Click to expand...

I would submit that database corruption is not normal.
 
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