Help me organize these entourage databases

August 8, 2007 4:01 PM

I'm trying to free up space on an overstuffed laptop. The laptop's owner uses Entourage 2004 for mac and has an enormous amount of email stored on it. I noticed in the user data folder there are 2 databases, one called "database" and one called "old database". Can these be combined into one? Is there a way to tell if one is a copy? If we could trash one that would help free a lot of space.
posted by missmle to computers & internet (3 comments total)

the 'old' database is probably from a previous backup. that's the way entourage does things when you use the database utility to rebuild a database - which is a good thing to do on a regular basis.

look at the modification date of the 'old' database and you'll probably see that it is indeed 'old' and can be deleted.

so, if you are trying to free up space, that is a good thing.

but, do a database rebuild if you have space anyway.

to do this, launch entourage but immediately hold down the option key. you'll be presented with the database utility. choose 'rebuild'. this will do the same thing as you are seeing, that is, it will make an 'old' database and create a rebuilt new one that makes a nice new compact one. once, you see it up and running on the next entourage launch you can delete the 'old' database OR you can use the 'old' database as a backup.
posted by roderashe at 4:16 PM on August 8, 2007

As a side note, OmniDiskSweeper is a good way of figuring out where all your space went.
posted by starman at 5:22 PM on August 8, 2007

They might not have an enormous amount of mail, so much as an amount of enormous mail ... Entourage keeps everything in that one file, including attachments.

So if they've been emailed big binary files like MP3s, videos, PDFs, images, they're all in that file, despite the fact they may have done a Save or copy somewhere else. So you might want to take a look at the mail (sort by size?) and see what can be deleted.
posted by AmbroseChapel at 4:17 PM on August 9, 2007