Entourage X just wiped out 12 days of messages?!?!

[Jeffrey McPheeters]

Title: Entourage X just wiped out 12 days of messages?!?!

Okay, not sure if I’ve ever experienced or seen this reported before:

Last night, I shut down the apps on my PowerBook Pizmo running OS X 10.1.3, and when I went into the house and started it up, then launched EntourageX, I noticed that the InBox looked as if I had just stepped back in time to 4/3/2002. I looked through everything and it was the same in every single folder. I process a couple hundred message each day, and this day had been no different; I had sent out several key e-mails and had received many messages that are important. Unfortunately, my last archival backup was from the end of March, so I cannot resurrect the messages unless there’s a way to get them out of the database.

In the meantime, I booted into OS 9 (haven’t done that in ages) and ran Disk First Aid, then Disk Warrior, which found a lot of problems it seems, and then Norton, and rebuild the desktops. Rebooted into OS X. Then tried Entourage. It still was missing the 12 days. It also abruptly quit. So I went back to OS 9 again and ran Disk First Aid, which found a couple of problems with the directory, so I ran DW again and it found only a couple of minor discrepancies which it fixed.

Rebooted to OS X and then launched Entourage with Option key down and ran normal rebuild. 12 days still missing. So I relaunched with option key and ran advanced rebuild. Still missing the 12 days. So I guess that’s that, unless someone thinks there’s a way to get into the original databases. I’ve kept the original one and will put it on a CD tonight. It’s almost 380MB.

Anyone heard of this happening before and what they did about it? I have Retrospect doing daily backups, however, as luck would have it, yesterday was the day I chose (being tax day, I thought I’d celebrate) to try and rearrange the way I was using Retrospect, so I had erased the most recent stuff because I had an archive handy, but I should have moved the critical stuff to another partition, which I usually do, as a safety mechanism. But in my haste, I fumbled and now I’m wondering if the two weeks are just lost or if there’s some way to get at those messages.

Sorry for the long post. Any help is much appreciated.

Jeffrey