Thomas L. Miller wrote:
>I saved an unsent message, quit PowerMail and cloned my iMac’s hard
>drive to two external hard drives — nothing unusual, I do every week.
>
>I restarted from the internal drive, and after PM started, I saw that
>except for some very recent messages, I was missing all the messages
>sent after mid-September 2013.
Obviously, PowerMail is now using an older version of your database, and has
only retrieved very recent messages still present on the server.
First possibility: instead of copying your database to the backup drive, you
copied in the wrong way, replacing your main database with the backup. However
if your backup was 1 week old, then you should not have lost all messages since
September 2013.
Second possibility: PowerMail has switched to another database, which was a
backup you made in September 2013. If your two external drives were still
mounted when you started PM, then maybe the 2013 backup was on one of these
drives; if not, then the 2013 backup was on your internal drive. How PowerMail
can switch to another database? Multiple possibilities:
- you switched manually from the file / database / switch user environment
menu, then selected your 2013 backup
- you switched manually by double-clicking in the Finder the Message Database
file from your 2013 backup
- you used Spotlight, which found a message in this backup, and opened the
message
- if your main drive is entirely cloned (which software are you using for
this?), and you boot from your backup drive, then maybe at some point there
will be a confusion between two drives, and the database has been opened from
the cloned drive instead of the main drive. But again, if the clone is more
recent than 2013, then you should not have lost recent messages.
As previously suggested, launch PM then use the file / database / switch user
environment menu. The open dialog will point to the location of the currently
used database. You will see on which drive it is, and in which folder, and you
can select your main database if you are currently using an old backup.
You can search in the Finder for files named "Message Database" to see if you
have multiple copies on your drive. I suggest that you first zip each PowerMail
folder containing those database, to be sure you don't destroy anything, then
double-click on a Message Database file to open it (PM will then "switch" to
this database) and see if it contains your recent messages. If you find
obsolete backups, you can keep a zipped version, but delete the uncompressed
one to be sure to never again switch to it inadvertently.
>PS: Looking at the Message databases in my PM folder, there is only one
>labeled "Message Database,” but one is labeled “Message Database.old”
>and both show today as when last modified.
The .old files are created when you compact your database. You can try to
delete the files without the .old extension, then remove .old from the name, to
restore the database to its state before the last compact (there are 4 of them:
Message Database, Address Database, Server-side Database, and Setup Database;
do this for the 4!). Of course, when you do this, PM should not be running, and
make sure to zip the containing folder first to have a backup.
I hope you will find your messages back!
Jérôme - CTM Engineering
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