This is a bit long, but hopefully the details will prove useful in finding a solution.
Yesterday I found myself with a corrupt and unrecoverable Entourage vX database for the third time since I upgraded from 2001 to vX (a couple of months ago). I mentioned one of the occurrences to the list the second week of July, when I lost my database in between speaking sessions at the Expo. All three times the symptoms have been exactly the same: Entourage starts feeling sluggish, so I try to do a Typical Rebuild. The rebuilding process *appears* to be working fine. The progress bar indicates that the rebuild is complete when I get the following error message: "Rebuilding failed. It is likely that your database cannot be repaired." The first two times this happened I tried an advanced rebuild, but that lost about 80% of my database. I didn't even bother trying an advanced rebuild last night/today. The first two times, I had backed up a few days earlier, so I restored the database from the backup and did a (successful) Typical Rebuild to ensure that it was in good shape. Luckily, both times I hadn't received too much "important" mail in between the latest backup and the corruption, and the most recent backup was able to successfully rebuild. After the second incident, I got paranoid, so I set up Retrospect to backup my Entourage database every day at 9am, 1pm, 7pm, and midnight, based on my usage patterns, so if I lost my database I'd lose, at most, a few hours of emails. (Unfortunately, yesterday I had a LOT of important correspondence back and forth, but that's not too relevant to this discussion.) At around 10pm last night my database was again feeling sluggish, so I tried a Typical Rebuild. I got the dreaded error. I restored from the 7pm backup, tried to rebuild, got the error. I restored from the 1pm backup, same result. 9am backup, same result... Etc. I went back two days, and every time I got the same result -- my database could not be rebuilt. What's frustrating is that based on my testing here, the database is becoming seriously corrupt well before it exhibits any symptoms of corruption. I'd have no problem doing a Typical rebuild on a regular basis as "preventative" maintenance, but I no longer have any clue when I should be doing it, since I'm now feeling that if I see any problems, it's already too late. Luckily, while the database was very slow and couldn't be rebuilt, I could still access it. Perhaps I'm just being paranoid, but rather than work with a database that might possibly have some trace of corruption I decided to rebuild the entire thing from scratch. I created a brand new identity, dragged each mailbox to the desktop from the "bad DB" and then re-dragged it to the new identity (hopefully this won't transfer any corruption?). I then spent about 10 hours between last night and today reconstructing everything else using Paul's Export/Import scripts. But more importantly, does anyone have any clues as to why I'm having these problems? I used Emailer for years years without ever having a single database problem (and had a 300+ MB database with well over 30,000 messages). I used Entourage 2001 for over a year without a single database problem. Yet in two months I've had three unrecoverable ones with Entourage vX. My current database is about 200MB with about 17,000 messages, which should be well within the "safe" bounds. I'm going to look into some of the archiving solutions, but with an application that support a max database size of 4GB, 200MB doesn't seem that big ;) -- To unsubscribe: <mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED]> archives: <http://www.mail-archive.com/entourage-talk%40lists.letterrip.com/> old-archive: <http://www.mail-archive.com/entourage-talk%40lists.boingo.com/>
