Recovering Entourage Files

Welcome to Apple Discussions.

For help with Entourage, start here at the MVPS site's Entourage Help Clinic.

The files for your Entourage database are in your user account at ~/Documents/Microsoft User Data/Office 2004 Identities/Main Identity/. Please post a list of what's in that folder. Also the size of the file Database would be helpful.

Hi - I have had exactly the same problem, following my acceptance of the latest autoupdate for MS Office. The key file, "database" in Documents/ MS User Data/Main Identity/Database is not missing, but it doesn't have the email data. Also my preferences for Word (spell corrections and keystroke commands etc) are all lost.

I'm at a total loss and wonder if I should pay for software to search for these files. When I use spotlight to search for known emails, they appear on the spotlight list, but cannot be found when clicked.

Please let me and others know if you find a solution to this awful state. I am suddenly aware of the huge windows advantage of being able to return to an earlier state. Thanks,

In case you can help: this is what I see in
Main Identity:

Mailing Lists
Signatures
Rules
Database 1.33 Gig

That size sounds like enough to contain 2 years of email, yet when I click on it I get the "new user" set up screen for entourage.

Also my preferences for Word (spell corrections and keystroke commands etc) are all lost.

Those and the problems with Entourage's database are unrelated. The files in the Main Identity folder are only for Entourage. Not to say though that you may be having problems with the hard drive itself.

I would check that first. Boot to your OS X Installation CD/DVD. Once the Mac has started up to the disk, don't install OS X, but go to the menu bar and launch Disk Utility. Choose you hard drive in Disk Utility's left pane and then click "Repair Disk". If it finds any errors, keeping repeating the repair sequence until it reports no errors. If after more than three attempts you continue to get errors, then you're going to have to use something more capable, such as Disk Warrior.

From the size of your Entourage database, the mail is there, but not being accessed. Shut down Entourage if you have it running. Make a copy of the Main Identity folder to your desktop (or wherever you prefer) before proceeding to the next part. If trying to repair the database somehow makes things worse, you can also go back to your copy.

Hold down the Option key and launch Entourage. You will instead get the Database Utility. Select the "Rebuild Database" radio button and click Continue. When that's done, click the "Compact Database" button and click Continue. What this does is eliminate any deleted emails from database. When you delete emails in Entourage, they only get moved to an inaccessible part of the database. But they're still there, taking up space. Compacting the database actually removes that data. If you've never done this before, you could find your Entourage database to be much smaller afterwards.