Microsoft Entourage For Mac Backup

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Microsoft Entourage, which was part of the Microsoft Office suite of products through Microsoft Office for Mac 2008, was available to Mac users for years as an alternative to Apple Mail. We can provide answers to your Entourage questions, including: What do I do if my Microsoft Entourage email database is damaged or won't open? The way Microsoft Entourage and Apple's Time Machine are designed puts them on a collision course. Entourage's mail database is a single large file. Time Machine backs up files, and can't look.

Entourage Browser is a simple and intuitive application, which will help you to perform some basic operations in Microsoft Entourage, such as saving attachments to your disk, preview its contents. How To Manually Backup Your Microsoft Entourage Email Database Time Machine cannot backup your Microsoft Entourage email database properly because it is usually 'in use' (via the Microsoft Database Daemon). So you should regularly back it up manually. NOTE: This article does not apply to Microsoft Outlook for Mac. Time Machine is compatible.

Latest Updates!

Aug 07, 2010 Plus if you’re using your Entourage database, the Time Machine backup is not always reliable. So how do you back up your Entourage email on your Mac? Once a week (or however often you feel comfortable), you should back up your Entourage database to another location on your computer. That way, Time Machine can back up the mail database properly.

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Backup Your Data

Backup options for Outlook

Backup options for Entourage

Articles:

  1. Quit all Microsoft applications before backing up IMPORTANT!
  2. Backup Individual Items
  3. Entourage and Time-Machine-like backup (can be used by Tiger users)

Entourge How to

  1. Scripts to backup(uses FileMakerPro as runtime or your own version)
  2. Tutorial: create a time-machine-like backup
    (can be used by Tiger and Leopard users)
  3. Optional method- backup Entourage with Time Machine
    Do this once a day, once a week..set your own option

Sync Services were added to Entourage 2004 with update 11.2.3. More info on Sync Services here.

Keys to a good backup:

Just like any data that's important, backup is key to good computing practices. Find an easy solution for your backup needs and DO IT! I suggest reading the Take Control of Mac OS X Backups for general backup of your Mac. Just make sure you backup regularly. Set a Task to remind you. You can also use Automator and iCal to automate the process. See tutorial.

As a general rule you should shut down all Office programs (including Office Notifications) before any Entourage backups. For this reason Time Machine is not recommended to backup your database since it will be in use. If you want to use Time Machine see this alternative.

If the database gets written during the backup you can either (1) lose some data or (2) have a corrupt backup file.

It's possible not to discover corruption and you could be backing up a corrupt file. This is why you should keep an archive and/or snapshot of older backups just in case. See this article on ways to verify your database.

Snapshot: This is most useful when you have inadvertently backed up a file that is damaged or unreadable, but say two weeks ago was fine. With the snapshot feature you can go back in time to a session where the file is undamaged and replace it.

Backup your Identity:

  • Duplicate your Identity folder. Set a recurring task to remind you. Location of Identity
  • Create an Entourage archive (.rge) See video
  • Use a script that will automate the process
  • Create a simple cron job to back up your Entourage data folders.
  • See Tutorial for easy backup (uses Automator and iCal)

Backup an individual mail folder:

Drag a folder to the desktop. This creates an MBOX file that can later be dragged back into Entourage or opened with a text editor. You will need to drage each subfolder individually. Tip: use one of the scripts to export folders. It includes subfolders.

Tip: drag your MBOX files into a new Identity, then switch Identities to search old mail. This keeps your regular database lean and more responsive. Microsoft word night mode mac app.

See Video: MBOX files

Back up an individual email:

Drag an individual message out of Entourage to your desktop to create individual (.eml) file.

Back up Contacts:

Your contacts can be exported for backup. File-> Export Contacts.

In Entourage 2004 you can select to Export as an Entourage archive. Just check Local Contacts.

Exporting groups cannot be done with Entourage File-> Export, but you can export groups using scripts:

  • Group Stuff to backup Entourage 2001
  • Export-Import Entourage for Entourage X, 2004, 2008

New Backup Options starting with Entourage 2004

Entourage can export items such as mail messages, tasks, contacts, notes, and calendar events to an Entourage archive(.rge extension. These files are much smaller than duplicates of Entourage data files.

What *doesn't* an Entourage archive preserve?

Microsoft Entourage For Mac

Archives are stored in non-proprietary, 'industry standard' data formats. That means that the information that can be preserved is essentially 'lowest common denominator' attributes that any application would have. What is not preserved are any Entourage specific meta-data: message history (what you have forwarded, replied to, etc), accounts, categories, projects, links etc.

Third Party Applications for Backup

Be sure to quit Entourage and the Microsoft Database daemon, or your backup could be corrupted.

One free option is to use eMessage Archiver. It uses a free runtime version of FileMaker. Discontinued but still available for download.

Another option that backs up to FileMaker is Mail to FileMaker Importer by Ben Waldie. Requires you have FileMaker installed. $14.99

Microsoft Entourage For Mac Backup Download

EagleFiler by the author of SpamSieve is worth checking out as a backup option. See Use EagleFiler to archive Outlook & Entourage messages for more info.

Retrospect warning: You might experence this error:

Can't read file 'Database', error -54 (file is busy/locked), path: 'Documents/Microsoft User Data/Office 2004 Identities/Main Identity/Database'.

Be sure to quit Entourage before backing up. You may find that there are other processes which still have the database open, specifically the 'Microsoft Database Daemon'. Entourage uses the Daemon as a centralized DB engine. If you use Retrospect's facility to run an Applescript prior to a backup, both Entourage and the Daemon can be shutdown, albeit with some annoying caveats.

Scripts to Backup

Microsoft Entourage For Mac Backup Windows 10

Entourage X and 2004: A free but less thorough archiving program than eMessage Archiver is the adaptation of Dan Crevier's Filemaker package (Transfer to Archive E ), available on Allen Watson's script web site.

Entourage 2001 back up script can be found here.

Create Cron Job to Backup:

Part 5 of Learning the Terminal series by Chris Stone outlines how to create a simple cron job to back up your Entourage data folders regularly and automatically.

Tip to Organize Your Backups Chronologically

See tutorial on using this option to create an automatic backup of your data. To backup Entourage using Time Machine, you will need to follow the directions here.

Entourage Software For Mac

Use FolderOrgX (freeware) to organize your backup files info folder by date. FolderOrg is an AppleScript Folder Action that organizes files and folders by moving them into dated subfolders. This is helpful in keeping files and folders organized by the day they were added, not created or modified. The folder action does not work on external drives.

Entourage exports your data as ' Main.rge'. Adding additional archive files to the same folder presents a naming problem. Using FolderOrgX will organize your data into a folder with date they were added.

This is especially helpful when you remove old backups. Just remember to keep a snapshot on a regular basis. I like to keep at least, one backup archive per month.

This little Folder Action is easy to use and indispensable IMHO. I use this for my downloads folder, archive folder and my screen shots folder. This is crucial for my downloads folder. If you are like me you download way more than you have time to install. Having the downloads in a dated folder tells me that if I haven't installed and it's really old I must not need it. I delete the folder and clear up space for more downloads. :-)

Microsoft Entourage For Mac Backup Windows 7

Installation

Microsoft Entourage For Mac Help

  1. Drag 'FolderOrg X' file into folder '/Library/Scripts/Folder Action Scripts/'
  2. Turn Folder Actions on with Folder Actions Switch

How to Attach FolderOrg X to a Folder: Use contextual menu to add to any folder.

What could be easier?