Entire database gone/disappeared!

[Guest]

Hello there,

We are running Entourage 2004 on Mac OS X 10.4.2 and everything was
working fine just a few hours ago. But now, suddenly, we launched
Entourage, and EVERYTHING is gone in Entourage -- no messages, no
accounts, no contacts, nothing. There is only one identity, "Main
Identity", so there's no other identities to switch to.

When I go out to the Finder to look at the "Microsoft User Data->Office
2004 Identities->Main Identity" folder, I can see that my database is
there, and it is 18.1 MB in size!! So it seems like all the data is
inside that database!

I tried every single option in the database utility to rebuild the
database, but still nothing. After a rebuild, the database file that
it rebuilds is still the exact same size. The rebuilt database is 18.1
MB large, but still nothing in Entourage.

Does anybody have any emergency ideas??

Thanks!
Scott

 

[Rebecca Harriss [MSFT]]

Hello there,

We are running Entourage 2004 on Mac OS X 10.4.2 and everything was
working fine just a few hours ago. But now, suddenly, we launched
Entourage, and EVERYTHING is gone in Entourage -- no messages, no
accounts, no contacts, nothing. There is only one identity, "Main
Identity", so there's no other identities to switch to.

When I go out to the Finder to look at the "Microsoft User Data->Office
2004 Identities->Main Identity" folder, I can see that my database is
there, and it is 18.1 MB in size!! So it seems like all the data is
inside that database!

I tried every single option in the database utility to rebuild the
database, but still nothing. After a rebuild, the database file that
it rebuilds is still the exact same size. The rebuilt database is 18.1
MB large, but still nothing in Entourage.

Does anybody have any emergency ideas??

Thanks!
Scott

Hi Scott,
Any chance you might have stored your Identity or Microsoft User Data
elsewhere on your machine or on a server, and created an alias to that
location?

If you search for Office 2004 Identities on your hard drive, do you find it
in another location?

Can you launch terminal and navigate to the Microsoft User Data folder and
do an ³ls² to see if the identity is perhaps hidden?

Thanks,
Rebecca

Rebecca Harriss
Microsoft Corporation
Macintosh Business Unit, Entourage Test

This posting is provided ³AS IS² with no warranties, and confers no rights.

 

[Guest]

Actually, a follow-up to my previous posting -- turns out that our
database was originally 150 MB, but somehow it became an 18.1 MB
database! I guess that's the default size for a new Entourage
database. Luckily, we have a backup from a few days ago -- but
interestingly enough, our Retrospect Server from this morning did NOT
backup the main identity today... as if the database had disappeared
before the backup kicked in!

So I'm trying to piece together the puzzle here... it seems like
Entourage was working fine, then the Main Identity database disappeared
at some point, the backup didn't backup (because there was nothing to
backup), and then when we launched Entourage again, it created a new
database from scratch.

Perhaps the directory got damaged -- I'm running Disk Warrior now.

Any other ideas?

Thanks,
Scott

 

[Guest]

Rebecca,

You're a genius!!!!! THANK YOU!!

The user moved their Microsoft User Data folder somewhere else on their
hard drive... so Entourage rebuild a new database from scratch for
them when they launched it.

And the reason the backup didn't catch it was because we were backing
up the Documents folder, and they moved it outside of the Documents
folder.

Thanks,
Scott

 

[Rebecca Harriss [MSFT]]

Rebecca,

You're a genius!!!!! THANK YOU!!

The user moved their Microsoft User Data folder somewhere else on their
hard drive... so Entourage rebuild a new database from scratch for
them when they launched it.

And the reason the backup didn't catch it was because we were backing
up the Documents folder, and they moved it outside of the Documents
folder.

Thanks,
Scott

Glad that you were able to find the data! Thanks for the update.

Unless a user creates an alias upon moving it, Entourage creates another
Identity as it doesn¹t know where to find it. This is standard OS procedure
for preferences and other data as well.

Thanks,
-Rebecca
Rebecca Harriss
Microsoft Corporation
Macintosh Business Unit, Entourage Test

This posting is provided ³AS IS² with no warranties, and confers no rights.

 

[Guest]

These replies are showing up in the wrong order on my newsreader over
here, but just wanted to clarify that the problem is solved. Thank
you, Rebecca!!