[X4U] Where Entourage stores its messages

[Lorin Roche]

> Does anybody know where Entourage stores all its messages etc...I want 
> to
> backup all my mail.
>

It's all in your Documents folder.

Get to know your Documents folder. But don't move things from it until 
you know what you are doing. And I think it is better to leave the 
Microsoft User Data (henceforth known as the MUD folder) in the 
Documents folder where Entourage puts it.

To duplicate or backup your MUD folder, this is the routine I follow.

1. First quit Entourage.

2. Then close the database. Entourage has a daemon running in the 
background to remind you of calendar events. This is a little thing, 
invisible to the user, that only shows up when you tell your Mac to 
show you background processes. You do this by opening the ACTIVITY 
MONITOR which is a utility in your UTILITIES folder. (I keep it in the 
Dock, for ease).

If necessary hit command-1 to get ACTIVITY MONITOR to list the 
processes running,

3. type "DATA" in the box at the top, and you will see it display 
something like this:

379	 Database Daemon	0.00	4	14.88 MB	216.93 MB	

4. Hit the QUIT PROCESS button. Now you have quit both Entourage and 
its database daemon, so you won't be backing up an "open" database.

5. Now you can safely back up your MUD folder. You can hit command D to 
duplicate it, and then change the name from ...user Data "copy" to  . . 
. user Data current date, or drag and drop it to another partition or 
to a CD or DVD. I back mine up every day to a separate hard drive, and 
label it with the date, that way i have recent copies of all emails, 
contacts, calendar events and attachments.

The little backup routine described above will seem simple after you 
have run through it several times.

By the way, I have never had any trouble with Entourage in years of 
use, and i have been using it from about the first day it was released, 
whenever that was, years ago. I find it a superb program. It has tens 
of thousands of emails in it.

The ONE thing I do is that I don't save any attachments IN Entourage. I 
get HUGE files all the time, photos and entire books, and I just drag 
and drop all attachments i want to keep into a folder called ENTOURAGE 
ATTACHMENTS. I do this in order to keep the overall size of my 
Entourage database relatively small.

Lorin