I was using Entourage X (part of Office X for the Mac) and its upper limit for its database (combining address book, calendar items, categories and e-mail boxes) was 4GB. That was the magic number for size past which it asked to rebuild.

When it tried to compress itself at my command, I ran out of disk space on a partitioned hard disk.

Double-Whammy. Each retry further damaged the data.

Drive Savers took 10 days but couldn’t fix it. They gave me a range dependent upon how successful they were. I’d used them once before, and pled poverty as I was doing a non-profit newsletter at the time. It ended up costing almost $500 for restoring an old version.

I was sooooo close to running a backup when this happened it could have been backed up. I was also within hours of a long 3 day train trip where I was planning to purge thousands of files and archive old e-messages.

Blah blah blah.

So I lost recent contacts, years of old e-mails.

I upgraded to a newer version of MS Entourage that allows bigger DBs though that might just enable me to repeat my harmful behavior of saving files I never really needed, used or will use.

It’s springboarded me to clean up, on and off my computer, and purge lots of stuff.

It’s liberating. I wish I’d done this sooner.

The pain is gone and I have improved my backup schedule and built additional redundancies into my actions.

I am using Retrospect for backups and write scripts, then back up to removable drives.