Re: Entourage's last big issue: Backup

[Paul Berkowitz]

Title: Re: Entourage's last big issue: Backup  

On 3/26/06 1:29 PM, "Allen Hancock" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:

>
> On Mar 25, 2006, at 5:04 PM, Paul Berkowitz wrote:
>> In Entourage 2004, the limit is in terabytes - millions of GB -  
>> much larger
>> than any computer hard disk. The practical limit is c. 1 million items
>> (actually 2 million, but messages are 2 items each so effectively 1
>> million.)
>
> But if you get 1 new email, you would have to backup the entire  
> multi- GB of data!
>
> This is, IMO, the last real hurdle to setting Entourage as the  
> primary email program for client's who don't already have a strong  
> preference.
>
> (thank you very much for the spotlight searching & sync services!)
>
> As the backup administrator for many clients with 10-20 users, having  
> to backup 20-40 GB+ per night just makes me cringe.
>
> I can't wait until MS tackles this one... it'll be Entourage for  
> everyone once that happens!
>
Why don't you have them run both an incoming and an outgoing rule on every message that saves the message to disk? It has to be done by AppleScript but is a total of 3 lines, once you establish which Finder folder you want to save them to. You could make a more elaborate version that creates a new subfolder every day and/or month, if you wished. Then just back up that Finder folder incrementally, and not the Database. If and when you needed to restore from backup, just drag the .eml files into an empty new database. So you might want a  more elaborate system where you had subfolders arranged hierarchically like your Entourage folder hierarchy. And you wouldn't be backing up contacts, events tasks or notes this way, but you'd have those from SyncServices. The simple version of the script is:

---------------------------

property whichFolderPath : "" -- insert "Macintosh Hard Disk:Users:username:folder1:folder2:" if you don't have Script Debugger

if whichFolderPath ≠ "" then
   try
       set whichFolder to whichFolderPath as alias -- errors if deleted
   on error
       set whichFolderPath to ""
    end try
end if
if whichFolderPath = "" then
   set whichFolder to (choose folder)
    set whichFolderPath to whichFolder as Unicode text
end if

tell application "Microsoft Entourage"
    set theMsg to item 1 of (get current messages)    
    save theMsg in whichFolderPath     
end tell

--------------------------------------

Since the Entourage script menu cannot save changes to script properties in scripts made with Script Editor 2 as found in Panther and Tiger, nor in Smile 3, you'll need to enter the file path of the folder you want the messages saved to, in the top line, if you don't have Script Debugger which can save scripts as Resource-Fork scripts.

Saving in a folder path (rather than to the file-to-be's path as the dictionary says) saves it inside the folder and avoiding errors with duplication of file names or colons in the subject. It's more complicated if you want to save in subfolders (get 'storage' of theMsg, then name, to get the Entourage folder's name, make a new subfolder with the Finder if it doesn't exist yet, etc.)

Another way to do it, instead of running this script from a rule on every message received and sent, would be to run a script at backup time that checked for new files in the Entourage Spotlight folders and accessed the items - not just messages but everything else - from the ID info in those metadata files, and do the saving then. But that would be quite an operation...

--
Paul Berkowitz
MVP MacOffice
Entourage FAQ Page: <http://www.entourage.mvps.org/faq/index.html>
AppleScripts for Entourage: <http://macscripter.net/scriptbuilders/>

PLEASE always state which version of Microsoft Office you are using - 2004, X  or 2001. It's often impossible to answer your questions otherwise.

--
Paul Berkowitz