How do I recover my Entourage Calendar?

February 26, 2007 10:01 PM

How do I recover my Entourage Calendar? -- While importing my Entourage calendar into iCal, my MacBook Pro froze up, and I had to Force Quit both programs. When I restarted Entourage, my entire calendar (appointments, dates, events) was completely blank. Any geniuses out there who can help me recover it?
posted by ruwan to Computers & Internet (1 answer total)

Best answer: Well, hardly a genius rather a long time Mac user that has somehow managed to use Apple machines at pretty much every bank I've worked for.

Ok, obvious question - backups? Even if a few days old, it might be more expedient to just restore and be done with it. So if you decide to restore your database we're done.

But if you don't have complete backups of Entourage, can you see your calendar in iCal? If you see your data in iCal use it's built in command to backup the database (at least you'll have a copy that way). I've never pushed data from iCal to Entourage myself, but there are scripts here which claim to do so. They seem to have scripts to push / pull data into / out of Entourage & iCal / AddressBook. So if you're calendar is not the only dataset hosed, maybe these folks can help. So if you've got data in iCal and the next step fails, you'll have to get your information back into Entourage via these scripts.

Now Entourage. Unless you've fiddled significantly with your installation, in your home folder under 'Documents' there should be a folder named 'Microsoft User Data'. Look for (on my machine / my version) 'Office 2004 Identities'. Then 'Main Identity'. There should be a file called 'Database' and hopefully it's non-zero in size. User File -> Get Info to determine the size of your database.

If it's zero in size then you'll have to search about and see if there is a copy floating about someplace on your Mac. If you can't find a non-zero sized copy of 'Database', you have no choice but to proceed with the scripts detailed above, exporting data from iCal back into Entourage.

If you do see this file and greater than zero in size, backup immediately. You don't have to do anything fancier than a Finder 'Duplicate' command but please do it. To be totally safe, I'd suggest dragging the copy you've just made to the Desktop.

Now we've got a database and we have to restore it to a state where Entourage can see it. I've had to do this ONCE. In my case it worked, however I was just lucky - I've read lots of accounts where it failed. So although things look good, don't get too excited.

This knowledge base article will help you restart Entourage in a special mode, verify the database we've found is NOT corrupt (if do we're done), then repair and rebuild it. After this exit Entourage, backup again, then restart and things should be fine.

Hope this helps!
posted by Mutant at 11:36 PM on February 26, 2007