Yesterday I had a discouraging experience with MS support and wanted to see if anyone else has experienced the same issue.
It seems that when the Entourage database gets really large there is a high possibility for it to become corrupted. Unlike Eudora, when the ER database becomes corrupted there is very little you can do to recover data from it, aside from trashing it and going back to a previously backed up copy that is not corrupted. I have a lot of email on ER and my messages file was about 385MB in size. The database became corrupted yesterday and I paid $35 for the support call to MS to see what I could do to fix it and recover my email. I knew the call was going to go bad when the tech told me "We don't really support the Mac OS here". <G> We went through a series of diagnostics together on the phone and he came to the same conclusion that I did initially - that my ER database had become corrupted. He advised me that my only option was to trash the Identities folder and let the program recreate a new one. When I asked him what could cause an ER database to become corrupted, he advised me that it usually happens when the file gets too big. "How big is too big?" I asked. "It depends on what the configuration is on your machine - how much ram, processor speed, etc." he said. "So let me understand you correctly," I said, "You know that the database gets corrupted when the file gets too large, but you don't know the optimum size to keep it down to so I can prevent this from happening again. So I'm just supposed to keep using the product until the database becomes corrupted again, then reinstall from a backup to recover my data? Somehow this doesn't sound very efficient to me." Folks, I love Entourage. In fact I just paid for Office X and will use Entourage X. But am I wrong to assume that the response I got above was not really worth $35 for a support call? There has to be a better way to prevent the database file from becoming corrupted in ER. Fortunately for me, I backup to CD-R regularly, so only lost about a week's worth of email, but it seems like this would be a pretty big issue. Anyone else figure out a fix for preventing it from becoming corrupted? Or is there a size limit that we should start archiving at to prevent this from happening? MS support was unable to tell me. Thx AB -- Adam Boettiger, Founder & CEO Email 911 - http://www.email911.com/ (503) 925-8434 - [EMAIL PROTECTED] Learn how to overcome email overload at http://www.email911.com/ -- To unsubscribe: <mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED]> To search the archives: <http://www.mail-archive.com/entourage-talk%40lists.boingo.com/>
