keeping mail identities on Flash Drive

[Dr Q]

Hello all,

I am trying to find a solution to keep my Entourage synced between two
computers - a MacBook that i use as my main computer at work and my
iMac at home.

I am aware of the solution of copying the MUD folder files. Since one
of my accounts is a GMail account which can only have one identity
downloading via POP, I have to be careful about turning off the GMail
account before transferring the files.

While this works, it relys on me to remember a step that is small
enough to forget. I notice that my MUD files only only take up about 2
GB of space. So I was wonderinging if a more effective solution could
be to use a flash drive with 4 GB as the location for storing my
identity files and then just swapping the drive out. I already use a
flash drive for my work files so it is something I am quite familiar
wiht swapping in and out of the computers.

Anyone have experience with this approach?

 

[Hat]

Hello all,

I am trying to find a solution to keep my Entourage synced between two
computers - a MacBook that i use as my main computer at work and my
iMac at home.

I am aware of the solution of copying the MUD folder files. Since one
of my accounts is a GMail account which can only have one identity
downloading via POP, I have to be careful about turning off the GMail
account before transferring the files.

While this works, it relys on me to remember a step that is small
enough to forget. I notice that my MUD files only only take up about 2
GB of space. So I was wonderinging if a more effective solution could
be to use a flash drive with 4 GB as the location for storing my
identity files and then just swapping the drive out. I already use a
flash drive for my work files so it is something I am quite familiar
wiht swapping in and out of the computers.

Anyone have experience with this approach?

Not with using a flash drive, per se, but it SHOULD work as long as you
make an alias of database file after it's moved to the flash drive; put
it in the correct place on each hard drive. Instructions regarding the
specifics are actually in the readme files with the Entourage
installation files. I use a similar solution to store the database out
on the network drive rather than the individual computer hard drives.

Steps:

1. Get out of Entourage
2. MOVE the Main Identity Folder to the flash drive
3. Copy an Alias of the Main Identity Folder to the computer hard drive
- inside the Office 2004 Identities Folder where it was originally
4. Restart Entourage - assuming your flash drive is still visible, it
should work - if it doesn't, just move everything back and you're back
to normal.

You don't want to start Entourage on either machine until the flash
drive is visible.

Give it a try; I'm curious to see if it will work.

 

[Dr Q]

Thanks. I was thinking using change Identities and then selecting the
identity from the flash drive might also work. It may be a while before
I can try it. I still need to get the 4GB flash drive. =)

 

[dan.augsburger]

Did you get this to work? I am about to travel for two months and would
like to take my main identity file with me on a flash drive.

 

[Dr Q]

good news and bad news. Bad news is The new flash drive I got was not
working properly so I needed to exchange it and I have not been able to
try it on a flash drive. Good news is that I was able to use an
external HD to test this and it worked fine.

I have been able to move the settings from one computer to another so I
am confident it can be done.

I copied my main identity to my external HD (connected via firewire)
and renamed the folder. i used mobile identity. I put an alias to the
mobile identity in the office 2004 identities. Then from within
Entourage I used switch identities. The alias showed up as valid
identity and I was able to switch

While I was not able to test it with the flash drive. I would not
expect it to be a problem based my test.

Hope this helps.

 

[Dr Q]

good news and bad news. Bad news is The new flash drive I got was not
working properly so I needed to exchange it and I have not been able to
try it on a flash drive. Good news is that I was able to use an
external HD to test this and it worked fine.

I copied my main identity to my external HD (connected via firewire)
and renamed the folder. i used mobile identity. I put an alias to the
mobile identity in the office 2004 identities. Then from within
Entourage I used switch identities. The alias showed up as valid
identity and I was able to switch

While I was not able to test it with the flash drive. I would not
expect it to be a problem based my test.

Hope this helps.

 

[Dr Q]

Just to close the loop. I was successful in getting Entourage to use an
identity saved on a flash drive across multiple drives. There is one
minor snag that I will submit in a new post. It seems that even after I
quit Entourage, it does not "release" the flash drive so I can eject
it. If I logout or shut down it is fine but MacOS won't eject because
it thinks the drive is in use.

 

[Mickey Stevens]

You may be able to take care of this by quitting the Database Daemon after
you quit out of all of the other Office applications, before you try to
unmount the drive.

You can do this using Activity Monitor in /Applications/Utilities/ or using
a simple script

tell application "Microsoft Database Daemon" to quit

that you can save someplace convenient and run whenever you need to quit the
Database Daemon.

 

[Dr Q]

Thanks Mickey. Your strategy did indeed solve the problem. For anyone
else reading this, I started a separate thread to deal with the issue
and the solution is explained in more detail there. Includes a link to
a site wiht a ready to go script to use.

Here is the link to the thread:
http://groups.google.com/group/micr...a0eb7fb1b49/d7541306474e3079#d7541306474e3079

Here is the website for the script:
http://www.entourage.mvps.org/glossary/daemon.html

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