On 24/4/06 22:58, "Rod D. Martin" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
> > > > Dear List, > > I'm running Entourage 11.2.3 on a 1.33GHz 17" PowerBook with 1GB RAM, using > Mac OS 10.4.6. Thanks for supplying all the relevant info, that makes things so much easier... > > I'm having a problem and I'm not sure what to do about it. > > I have a very large database, and haven't compacted it or rebuilt it in > quite some time. So I wasn't terribly surprised Friday when I got a message > saying there was a problem and I should rebuild it. Like you say, not really a major surprise - it does happen occasionally. > > Note that despite the message, it was working fine before I rebuilt it. Not at all unusual. The verification engine is very sensitive - any corruption may be limited (initially) to very small parts of the database that you may not normally touch. > > I rebuilt it, and the database size dropped from 4.64GB to 3.31GB, but best > I can tell there was no data loss (and I spent a long time switching back > and forth and taking notes on what was where to verify this). And > everything works just fine after the rebuild, with the speed boost you'd > expect. The size reduction is typical. As Entourage works it does not immediately reclaim the space freed up when you delete something, but leaves it as a 'hole' in the database that is marked as 'free for future use'. As new data arrives, these holes are re-filled before the database size is increased. However, if the holes are all relatively small, it may be some time before chunks of data that are small enough to fit into these holes turn up, so some slack space always does accumulate. This slack space can be reclaimed at any time by doing a compact of the database - this does not fix any database problems, but just reclaims the unused space. With a really old database, it can apparently speed things up a little, rather like de-fragmenting a hard disk. > > Now here's the weirdness. This morning, I got the "you've got a problem and > need to rebuild" message again. When I quit out of Office Notifications, > this went away, and I've been using Entourage without a problem all day > non-stop (pretty intensively too). But here a minute ago -- with Office > Notifications off -- I got the same message *again* from within Entourage > itself. Office notifications has nothing to do with the warning - that is handled by the database utility (found in /Applications/Office 2004/Office/). > > So....what do I do? And what's the likely prognosis? I'd try another rebuild, it can occasionally take a couple of tries to correct all the problems in a database. If you are not seeing any serious problems, then the prognosis is good - most minor problems can be fixed by the database utility. For peace of mind, it may be worth exporting all database items (file menu, 'export...' command). If there is still corruption, the export command will usually fail as it finds the area of corruption and can't retrieve a piece of data. If the export goes well, you could create a new identity and re-import everything into it, althoughyou will also have to recreate all your accounts, rules, MLM entries, categories, groups etc... Database migration is a far bigger pain than it need be. > > Thanks in advance, > Rod Martin > -- Barry Wainwright Microsoft MVP (see http://mvp.support.microsoft.com for details) Check out the Entourage User's WebLog for hints, tips and troubleshooting <http://homepage.mac.com/barryw/weblog/weblog.html> -- 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/>
