Address book gone

[Martin Rep]

After a crash of Entourage, all the entries in the address book are gone.
I can re-import them from the Mail address book, but then I would lose a lot
of additional info. Is there a way to restore the Entourage address book?
(Please don't ask me about backups ;-)
Thanks!



| Martin Rep
| The Independent Internet Mahjong Newspaper
| http://www.mahjongnews.com

 

[Barry Wainwright [MVP]]

First, try to use 'switch identities' under the Entourage menu - it's
possible that your old identity will show up there.

More likely is that the crash caused disk corruption (or, maybe even more
likely, that disk corruption caused the crash) that rendered the sectors
containing your data unreadable.

You did have a backup, didn't you? - ah, I see that you just learned a
valuable lesson the only way that anyone learns it (MVPs included)...

 

[Martin Rep]

Hi ;-)

You did have a backup, didn't you? - ah, I see that you just learned a
valuable lesson the only way that anyone learns it (MVPs included)...

I am not sure... I admit this is not the first time I have to do extra work
after not making a backup. Otoh, I think making backups is very complicated
and clumsy, and requires lots and lots of disk space. In Windows (3.1, I
believe), I could make daily small incremental backups (which I also
forgot... ;-)
I have used DotMac's Backup function, but I found it complex, and I recall
not being able to find lost data when I actually needed them. CCC (Carbon
Copy Cloner) seems to be better, but after just a few CCC-backups, my
external HD of 250 Gb appeared to be too small...
I am looking forward for the timeshift-function of Leopard, which seems to
do all this stuff without you ever having to do something about it.





| Martin Rep
| The Independent Internet Mahjong Newspaper
| http://www.mahjongnews.com

 

[Barry Wainwright [MVP]]

Hi ;-)




I am not sure... I admit this is not the first time I have to do extra work
after not making a backup. Otoh, I think making backups is very complicated
and clumsy, and requires lots and lots of disk space. In Windows (3.1, I
believe), I could make daily small incremental backups (which I also
forgot... ;-)
I have used DotMac's Backup function, but I found it complex, and I recall
not being able to find lost data when I actually needed them. CCC (Carbon
Copy Cloner) seems to be better, but after just a few CCC-backups, my
external HD of 250 Gb appeared to be too small...
I am looking forward for the timeshift-function of Leopard, which seems to
do all this stuff without you ever having to do something about it.

I'm not at all sure how well Timeshift will cope with the Office Database -
that can grow _very_ large. Mine is currently running at around 6Gb, and my
daily, incremental backup has to handle this file every time it runs. I
backup to a firewire 800 external disk, but even so, the backup takes about
10 minutes to run each morning, and the performance hit on my machine (a
powerbook G4 1.33GHz) while the backup is running is quite noticeable.

If timeshift is trying to capture more changes than once per day, I'm going
to run out of disk space very, very quickly!