On 7/6/04 9:26 am, "Mark Sittig" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
> Hey all, > > First off, thanks to everyone for the informative listserv replies. I > hope that my question will be addressed with the same attention and > thoroughness! I hope so! > > I've been a Eudora user for about six or seven years, starting with > Windows 95 (yuck!) on up through Mac OS X 10.3.4. I recently bought > Microsoft Office 2004 and have become intrigued by Entourage 2004. > The all-in-one aspect of the application is very appealing to me as > my schedule becomes increasingly packed. I also use a Palm Vx so the > ability to sync my handheld with a desktop database other than Palm > Desktop 4.1 would be a welcome change. I too was a died-in-the-wool Eudora user for many years before becoming convinced of Entourage's superiority overall - not to say that Eudora doesn't have some features I would love to see in Entourage, but Entourage has many more features I would hate to miss in Eudora! The choice of a mail client is such a personal issue you have to make your own assessment at the end of the day - what is one person's absolute 'must have' is just so much fluff & feature-bloat to another. > > Like any respectable nerd, I googled around to learn about issues of > possible database corrution. I would absolutely dread the loss of any > amount of my 5 years of accumulated e-mail. I guess my question > really has two parts: Me too! You should have seen some of the rants I wrote in the early days concerning the imbecility of the monolithic database system :) > > 1. What is the likelihood of database corruption assuming a message > count of 15k, a contact list of 300 people and a highly-used calendar? Very, very low. I am running a database containing approx half a million emails (including some 300k+ imported from Eudora), 2,000 contacts and something like 800 calendar events, not to mention 80+ text notes, a rake of tasks and what must amount to millions of links between them. I have never (in about 4 years now) had any database corruption that I couldn't blame on running early beta versions of entourage, and I take steps to minimise the impact of those! I know that some people encounter corruption from time to time, but given the numbers of people using entourage the incidence is very low. Also, the rebuild engine improve with every release, so the likelihood of getting unfixable corruption is vanishingly small and getting smaller. > > 2. Are there steps that can be taken to completely avoid database > corruption? Assuming my hard disk doesn't die, will regular database > rebuilds reduce the likelihood of losing and/or corrupting data? To completely avoid it? To be honest, no. Corruption of data on a disk will always occur at some point - for a million different reasons, mostly not connected with the computer or the programme that created the data. A stray cosmic ray can alter the state of one bit on a hard drive - completely outside of anyone's control. Can you minimise the effects? Certainly. Several ground rules apply: 1. Keep your system as stable as possible. Crashes in the system, entourage or the database daemon all have the potential for causing corruption. Avoid haxies such as keyboard interception routines or disk-writing modification routines etc. 2. Make sure you quit entourage (and the database daemon) cleanly at least once per day. This will write out any unsaved data and flush all the file buffers. 3. Do NOT rebuild more than necessary - there is a minuscule risk that doing rebuilds could cause corruption (I'm not suggesting any known or suspected problems here, it's just that it is a routine that processes and re-writes every byte of the database back to disk, so there is the potential for corruption to be introduced). In Office 2004 there is a new database utility that can scan your database in the background when entourage is idle (and NOT running on battery). This will pre-emptively alert you to any problems in the database before you would normally become aware of them and, in all likelihood, before they become too serious to repair. > > For the record, please assume bi-weekly backups but having to revert > to something even three days old would be difficult with changes in > calendar and e-mail flow. Nothing beats a good backup. You could also relieve the problems of missing mail by setting your POP accounts to 'leave mail on server for 7 days', changes to calendar and other aspects are a little harder to get round. Also note that entourage 2004 has a brand new 'export' function that will export selected data into a format that can easily be backed up and/or transferred to another copy. Also, the data is exported in a standard format (MBO format for mail, ics & vcs files for calendar and contacts etc.). The whole lot is formatted as a package, but right-click on the package and it's contents are made accessible. > > Thanks in advance for all replies! > -Mark -- Barry Wainwright Microsoft MVP (see http://mvp.support.microsoft.com for details) Seen the All-New Entourage Help Pages? - Check them out: <http://www.entourage.mvps.org/> -- To unsubscribe: <mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED]> archives: <http://www.mail-archive.com/entourage-talk%40lists.letterrip.com/> old-archive: <http://www.mail-archive.com/entourage-talk%40lists.boingo.com/>
