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Rebuilt MS Office(foolishly?) now lost nearly everything in Entourage

Avatar John Nicholas


A dialogue box advised me that MS Office had been corrupted and asked if I wanted to rebuild. I answered in the affirmative, and now Entourage has lost 99% of its history/content, together with 3 of my 4 email connections.

Whilst I can ( I hope) remake the 3 connections, I am more concerned with the loss of content.

I use Entourage for historical & other reasons perhaps too long to explain.

Last back up to external harddrive was yesterday. I have never had to delve into this to transfer stuff across to / back to the internal harddrive.

How do I go about this. Will need helping in Idiots guide language not techno-speak..........please.

Re: Rebuilt MS Office(foolishly?) now lost nearly everything in Entourage

Avatar Mick Burrell
I believe Entourage stores all its stuff in a database. If you look in ~/Documents/Microsoft User Data you should find something you can copy back.

Re: Rebuilt MS Office(foolishly?) now lost nearly everything in Entourage

Avatar John Nicholas
The app seems intact but the folders, history, settings, and entire address book have gone. So it is data thats gone awry not the basic app. Of course it's all on the latest partition of the external hd.

I am booted on the external hd at the mo.

However a) I don't know how correctly to or at least I can't seem to locate the User data
& b) I don't know how to copy stuff(if I find it) across from the external to the internal hd.

I tried migration assistant when booted on the internal hd but no doubt I did this incorrectly.

I Googled for help but didn't find external to internal, only the other way round.

GRRRRRRR..........

Re: Rebuilt MS Office(foolishly?) now lost nearly everything in Entourage

Avatar Euan Williams
John,
Migration Assistant is probably inappropriate as you have discovered, but you might have got better results with Time Machine.

If Mick's suggestion doesn't work for some reason (it certainly should work fine),
then you might just try Carbon Copy Cloner (donationware) > www.bombich.com <
this is a possible overkill, but will maintain any invisible OS links that a straight copy might miss.

Bombich CCC provides good help files to explain what is going to happen, and the implications.
If in doubt think these through, and try it out on some innocuous test files. That will give you confidence.
Turn off the TV, the dog, the children, the radio, and take your time...

Start from your External drive.
Note down carefully the names and positions of all the files and folders you want to deal with, so you can remember their original "what goes where" positions. Sometimes it helps to use List View in the finder and take a screen shot: Cmnd+shift+4 and drag and left mouse click (or) the same key combination and press space bar within the window followed by a left mouse click.

BACKUP your SUSPECT files from your internal drive to a different drive space -- and label them clearly.
(You don't want to backup your dud info to the original backup space and thereby inadvertently wipe the "good" backup).
Delete the original suspect files on your internal drive. This leaves a slot for the chosen 'good backup' to fill.

Make the cloning Source disc your external (good backup) hard drive, and your Target disc the internal (lost info) drive.
Choose "incremental backup of selected items" -- note that the source drive now displays all items (including some normally invisible unix files such as var, dev, etc. which you can ignore).

Select the MS Office Entourage files you wish to replace by UN-ticking ALL the others.

Clone the chosen files from your >Good< Backup external drive back to your Internal drive.

This might help in extremis,
good luck,
Euan.



Re: Rebuilt MS Office(foolishly?) now lost nearly everything in Entourage

Avatar Mick Burrell
John, sorry if that wasn't clear. The ~ sign means your home folder which is probably called johnnicholas and you may well see it represented by a small house icon on the left of a Finder window. If so, click it and it will show you all the files and folders in your home folder. In there you should find a folder called Documents and it's in there that you should find the Microsoft User Data folder.

If you've not already used Euan's suggestion, to copy from your external disc to the internal one, click on the smiley face icon - the Finder icon - on your dock. Click on the name of your INTERNAL disc in the finder window, then double click the users folder and you'll see your home folder contents as above. Navigate to the Microsoft User Data folder and if you're only going to copy certain files from within it, navigate so you can see them. Now, double click your EXTERNAL hard drive icon on your desktop so it opens a second Finder window. Navigate to the same folder as in the other window but make sure that this time you start from the name of your external hard drive. When you can see the files you want to copy in both windows, just drag them from the external drive's window to that of the internal drive.

Re: Rebuilt MS Office(foolishly?) now lost nearly everything in Entourage

Avatar John Nicholas
Thank you Euan, I have saved that info incase I run foul of things again (especially when fiddling with non-Apple stuff !!).

Mick, thank you for the careful follow up. Spotlight would not find the MS User Data, but your guide found it. Things (nearly) back to normal. Will continue to use for 48 hours or so before claiming success; and will not do another back-up until I am happy to lose the GOOD partition.
 
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