hi Kerry
thanks for the empathy & advice. i do have my TM backups back in China, but no access to them for a week or so. i'll attempt to restore from TM, butto be honest it sounds like i'm likely to encounter hassle & not sure if my contacts are at risk also, as i guess that entourage uses a single monolithic db. to be honest i've really had it with the product and think that i'm going to switch to using ical which although far from meeting requirements, sounds like it could be easier. i'm a first time mac user and really regretting spending my £2.5k on something that has just frustrated the **** out of me for the last 4 months. hey ho. tahnks again and may your problemsbe few.
Yeah, no I really do understand and if you're new to the Mac you
probably moved to it expecting a hassle free, fun experience!
Anyway, if you just use iCal and Addressbook they are more reliable in
terms of syncs and very little will go wrong. Many people made that
switch as they couldn't deal with what was going on with Entourage.
They though aren't as powerful as Entourage and aren't intended to be
but they work well and are fast. You will need to restore your info
from your Time Machine backups located in the following spots:
iCal - home user/Library - Just high lite the "calendars" folder in
this location, enter Time Machine and restore the folder from the date
and time you want
Addressbook - home user/Library/application support - high lite the
"addressbook" folder in this location, enter Time Machine and restore
the folder from the date and time you want
The other thing in using iCal and Addressbook is they are very
efficient in the way they back up using little disk space unlike
Entourage's monolithic DB. There's a point where backing up the
Entourage DB in Time Machine if it gets too large and it can get very
large with use thus using way too much disk space and time (review
this forum and you'll be surprised how large some people let their
Entourage DB get to). I tend to keep my active Entourage identity on
the leaner side for this reason and as I said if you do use Entourage
you have to have backups and backups that go back in time. Thus, I use
Data Backup that I have set for rotational 14 day backups and I run
this a 3 am first having the system via Quickeys shut down all open
applications. I also use Crashplan and let this thing backup to the
web just in case something disastrous happened to my local system.
I've found Entourage restores from Crashplan's web servers 100%. You
might want to check this out and it is reviewed a long with others in
this months Macworld and it rates the best. It is constantly running
in background and I never notice its activity but get a backup report
every week indicating backup times etc. This is really an excellent
system and you'd be able to retrieve your backed up stuff no matter
where you are in the world as long as you have access to the web.
Depending on your upload speed, your first backup may take quite some
time if you've chosen a lot to backup. Since its unlimited most of my
home folder is backed up to it except music and Parallels and VMWare
which are both fairly static (and massive in size so there's no way
I'd back these up to the cloud) and are backed up in a safe space a
way from my computer. As I said though, once you've done this first
back up you'll never notice it running. Its not expensive either - $54
for 1 year unlimited or cheaper if you take longer terms.
So, good luck. Oh and one other thing I thought I'd share with you is
I've been using both Mac and PCs for 25 years and for the first time
I've actually thought of just going to a PC once Windows 7 comes out.
I doubt I will but I've sure been thinking about it as the Mac has
been very frustrating around this whole sync services mess, at least
for me, for almost 2 years.
