Major, misterious database disaster

[Andrea González]

Hi.

I had a major disaster this morning. Can't understand what happened.
Last night, as I use to do, left the computer running with Entourage open so
it downloads email every hour and can automatically reply via rules to the
several inquiries and newsletter subscriptions I have to manage.

This morning everything was OK. I read two or three messages, then quit
Entourage and restarted the computer as I do every Saturday. I didn't do
anything else nor had any other software running at the time. No error
messages, nothing unusual.

But when opening Entourage again the identity was EMPTY!. It was even asking
me to create a new email account. Messages, contacts, accounts, notes were
all gone.

I immediately checked to make sure it had opened the right identity. To my
horror, the Database file for this identity was only 400K, while it should
be at least 50MB or something. I searched the hard drive and the only other
Database documents I found were from my other, older identities (2004, 2003,
etc.). No 2005 identity but the empty one at 400K. I checked everyone of
the other identities just to make sure... They had only the old information.

Now, this is a horrible disaster because I have a marketing campaign running
for my small business. It was very successful and yesterday I got about 250
messages from clients asking for more information. Since I got too tired, I
left 150 messages to manually answer today. Now they are all gone, gone!!

Anyone has an idea of what happened? Ideas to recover my information?
I've not heard of a problem like this before.


Some facts:

- I have a backup but it's two weeks old. I need to recover yesterday's
email. Unfortunately, because of too much spam, I have leave messages on
server disabled.

- I'm using Entourage X

- Every year I make a new identity to avoid having files grow too big, so my
2005 identity was pretty small, with only about 850 text messages in several
folders.

- Since I get a lot of spam, I delete it twice a month and rebuild database
through typical rebuild. Last rebuild was about ten days ago. Database was
in good shape.

- I've not written anything to the disc since the problem happened, in the
hope a data recovery program could help. I tried with VirtualLab running
from another Mac (both connected via firewire) , but to no avail. The only
Entourage thing it found was a 18K file.



Any ideas are welcomed. This is bad. I feel terrible
Thanks in advance folks.


Andrea.
Email: (e-mail address removed)

 

[Andrea González]

By the way I'm using Entourage 10.0.0 (1309), not 2004 version. Running on
Panther 10.3.5 with 750MB RAM. Have about 4.5 GB free on disk.

Andrea.




On 01/22/2005 3:40 PM, in article
BE18246F.215B%[email protected], "Andrea González"

Hi.

I had a major disaster this morning. Can't understand what happened.
Last night, as I use to do, left the computer running with Entourage open so
it downloads email every hour and can automatically reply via rules to the
several inquiries and newsletter subscriptions I have to manage.

This morning everything was OK. I read two or three messages, then quit
Entourage and restarted the computer as I do every Saturday. I didn't do
anything else nor had any other software running at the time. No error
messages, nothing unusual.

But when opening Entourage again the identity was EMPTY!. It was even asking
me to create a new email account. Messages, contacts, accounts, notes were
all gone.

I immediately checked to make sure it had opened the right identity. To my
horror, the Database file for this identity was only 400K, while it should
be at least 50MB or something. I searched the hard drive and the only other
Database documents I found were from my other, older identities (2004, 2003,
etc.). No 2005 identity but the empty one at 400K. I checked everyone of
the other identities just to make sure... They had only the old information.

Now, this is a horrible disaster because I have a marketing campaign running
for my small business. It was very successful and yesterday I got about 250
messages from clients asking for more information. Since I got too tired, I
left 150 messages to manually answer today. Now they are all gone, gone!!

Anyone has an idea of what happened? Ideas to recover my information?
I've not heard of a problem like this before.


Some facts:

- I have a backup but it's two weeks old. I need to recover yesterday's
email. Unfortunately, because of too much spam, I have leave messages on
server disabled.

- I'm using Entourage X

- Every year I make a new identity to avoid having files grow too big, so my
2005 identity was pretty small, with only about 850 text messages in several
folders.

- Since I get a lot of spam, I delete it twice a month and rebuild database
through typical rebuild. Last rebuild was about ten days ago. Database was
in good shape.

- I've not written anything to the disc since the problem happened, in the
hope a data recovery program could help. I tried with VirtualLab running
from another Mac (both connected via firewire) , but to no avail. The only
Entourage thing it found was a 18K file.



Any ideas are welcomed. This is bad. I feel terrible
Thanks in advance folks.


Andrea.
Email: (e-mail address removed)

 

[Mark Lindsay]

I had a very similar problem happen to me late last night. I was
reading email and removing spam when Entourage got hung up on the
preview of some junk spam. I restarted Entourage and everything was
gone! I spent the night and all day today researching and
trial-and-error problem solving. The good news is that everything is
now restored but the process was complex. What seems to happen is that
when Entourage tries to draw an email it doesn't like it will turn the
user database into an invisible trash file. When you reboot Entourage
it can't find the database so it creates a new one. You have to have a
program like DiskWarrior to rebuild your file structures and refind the
invisible file. Get DiskWarrior (about $80) and either use their
emergency startup disk or make your own (way more complicated). Start
up your computer with the CD and rebuild the drive's file structure
where your Entourage database resides. When done, DiskWarrior will give
you the opportunity to look at the new disk image and its file
structure and compare it with the old. Open the new disk image (it has
a magnifying glass in the icon) and do a search for "database". You
should find your database burried in some wierd place...not where its
supposed to be. Look for a very large file, that should point it out
quickly. Drag it somewhere where you know you can find it...onto a
Firewire drive or the desktop or a separate internal hard drive. Then
tell DiskWarrior to complete the process and restart your computer.
Drag the retrieved database to its old home in Hard
Drive>User>Documents>Microsoft User Data>Office X Identities>Main
Identity. Throw away the database made automatically in the past few
days. When you boot up Entourage your happy email world should all be
there. You may have to reboot the whole computer for Entourage to
accept the database as its own. Good luck

Mark

 

[Barry Wainwright]

The symptoms you describe are typical of the system being unable to locate
the Identity Files. The most likely cause is that a hard disk error, or
system file error have caused the files to be lost or damaged in some
unrecoverable way. Entourage will then, on startup, have recreated the
necessary directory structure and created the blank identity files as it
would in a 'first run' situation.

I would strongly advise booting your system from a CD and running Disk First
Aid or some third party disk repair utility. I would expect you to find
other disk errors. Some third party recovery tools may allow you to recover
the original database file - it all depends on what and where the damage
was.

 

[captoddk]

Welcome to the club of understanding Entourage Databases...
I too lost mine when I tried to re-organise my documents and I dragged
my entire dicument file off of the first frame of the Hard Drive onto
the desktop. I got an icon of a small white cloud that exploded! Not
a good little icon! No Document file. I did a search and found it,
not in the trash and placed it on the descktop.
Now Entourage did as you described, unable to find data it created a
new one. Not realising what happend I simply ran an improt as I had
Exported to a file two days earlier. I got my contacts and some
address book info back, but all my preferences, rules, and folders are
gone - and I can't find them. I have searched for all other files
found in the MUD file and replaced them with ones dated from the 20th,
but still no luck.
Likewise my mail (two years worth) is gone - but I could have swore I
saw the import importing 'Mail' for an extended period! the Database
file was 1.2 GIG!
Do you think I too have this hddgen deletion? Is that perhaps the
mysterious icon explosion?
HELP!
Thanks
Todd K

 

[Andrea González]

Hi. Thanks for your help. Actually I think I've discovered what happened.
Apparently Norton Antivirus 9.0 quarantined my database file!! (this was
done without any warning or virus alert). Now I need to ask: is it
possible that the database file may be infected by a virus even if I had
Norton running, with all virus definitions updated?? Mac viruses are so
rare...

Can an email message infect the entire database file?? I mean, I'm usually
inundated with PC virus (.exe attachments and the like), but they can't harm
a Mac. I delete them through an Entourage rule. And Apple Mail, when
detecting an infected incoming message (PC or Mac virus), deletes the
message but not the database file...

Now at Norton I have two options:

- Repair the file (which I understand may rather damage the database)
- Restore without repairing, which may be harmful in case it was a real
virus.

Did Norton did this by error?

What should I do now??

Has anybody else heard of something like this before?



Andrea.



P.S. I bought Disk Warrior this morning and ran it from my iBook, connected
to the other Mac via firewire. It found only a minor disk problem, which it
corrected successfully. There were no noticeable differences in both disk
images when previewing. At least not to my untrained eye...