Jérôme, thanks for the response. I tried a shortcut of what you recommended at the bottom (I have two other copies of the entire PM folder on the other drives). I put an “X” in front of the file names of the 4 (current) items and removed “.old” from the other 4. That didn’t help, but I think that could be because I compacted the database when I ran PM First Aid a day or two ago. I may have done the same thing with one of the other drives. However. I guess I can copy over from the ".old” files from the 3rd drive and try that. Ought to work, right??
The really odd thing is that PM was working perfectly when I quit it before cloning. I have cloned (SuperDuper) my hard drive 100s of times over the years with no problems. The clone is a copy of everything — web browser history, apps, Preferences, Libraries, music, photos, everything. Never has a restart of my Mac resulted in a change of PM’s Message Databases. These external hard drives are only active when I’m making clones — otherwise they are turned off/disconnected. Very, very, very odd to have this problem!!!! Tom Miller On Jul 23, 2015, at 9:02 AM, PowerMail Engineering <[email protected]> wrote: 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 --------------------------------------------------------------------- "The searching is fairly flexible on iOS and the speed is blinding. I mean instant, like you've got a Mac Pro doing it. If you use Foxtrot Search, get FoxTrot Attaché. If you don't use Foxtrot Search and you have a lot of files to search, check it out." FoxTrot Attaché Search user comment on iTunes Store UK Download a demo version from www.foxtrot.ch ---------------------------------------------------------------------
