Entourage causes so many problems, mostly due to its large database.
Transcript of the video:
The truth is that as an application, Microsoft Entourage is not bad, but what really sucks is that it stores everything–all the mail, all the calendar, all the contacts–in a single great big file that’s a database of sorts.
There are two big problems with this: one is that it causes Time Machine to freak out, and if Time Machine backs it up it’s an open database and frequently is useless when you try to restore it.
Furthermore, if any little change happens in it, which is constant when you’re using Entourage, Time Machine feels compelled to back it up again, promptly eating up all the space on your backup drive.
The last problem is that it can get corrupted, and when it gets corrupted, you may or may not be able to rebuild it successfully. That tends to trend towards not, and we have spent a lot of time trying to recover data from sick Entourage databases.
The good news is that if you are on an Exchange server you can throw out your Entourage database and reload it. But the better news is that Microsoft has finally replaced Entourage with Microsoft Outlook, which is part of the Microsoft Office 2011 Business Edition.
Outlook stores all of its files in a database but every little bit of data is in a separate file. The two benefits are that, one, it’s happy with Time Machine, and two, rebuilding the database can almost always be done successfully.
If you’re on Entourage and you’re not using a single account with an Exchange server, and maybe even if you are, you should get on Outlook.
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