I retired from personal blogging in July 2008.
But you can find me over at http://blog.xero.com.
The problem: Entourage has one big store for it’s local mail cache (pst file). So how does that work with Time Machine?
It doesn’t.
http://blogs.msdn.com/macmojo/archive/2007/12/12/it-s-about-the-data.aspx
Compatibility with Apple’s Time Machine backup feature in Leopard is a database area that has received a lot of attention recently. Because Entourage uses a single file database, over time it can become large (sometimes really large). In those cases, Entourage data will not work optimally with Time Machine. Our recommendation is to exclude your Entourage Identity folder(s) in the Time Machine preferences
and
… we understand that our Exchange customers want “an Exchange client on the Mac with features, performance, documentation, and reliability on par with Outlook.†This is a goal that will be achieved in stages, through Entourage 2008, its updates, and beyond.
Hopefully not another 5 year wait.
blog
This type of problem is quite well understood in the unix world. Traditionally, unix mail was stored in a single ‘mbox’ file in the user’s directory. This file was just appended with incoming mail, and if a user had different mail “folders”, these were just differently named ‘mbox’ files. Therefore, when you backed up your home directory, you backed up all the files which had changed and therefore all ‘mbox’ files which had received new mail. This resulted in backing up much more data than was really required, as you backed up the entire ‘mbox’ file.
For this reason, many people have chosen to use ‘maildir’ format mail storage in unix. This puts each email in a separate file in a structured directory format, which is indexed. This results in much more efficient mail storage, access, and backups.
So, I’d not really blame Apple or Time Machine for this problem. Rather, I’d blame Microsoft for continuing to use a mail storage format which results in problems which have been resolved for many years in other operating environments.
Rod, why don’t you run Vista or XP on Parallels and Office 2007. Then you will get everything you want.
Yah I can recall going back a long time Microsoft apps would store stuff in strange places and formats, with clients frequently in the dark about what was where, what had been backed-up and what they could safely delete.
If one were cynical, one would conclude that this approach was part of a wider strategy (including blame the platform).
I was just pointing our another reason that common email systems are broken. The monolithic data store turns out to be a issue as we move to continuos backup models like Time Machine. The work around is easy. Exclude the file, and rely on server side back up and OWA. I just think there is a great opportunity for next generation email.
Lots of opportunities. Here’s one. Rather than vendors getting us to deal with spam at the client, why don’t governments make it compulsory for ISP’s to stop sending it out at their end. The result is less traffic on the internet, less spam. If we can stop it on the client side they can do it on the server side. Make the ISP’s responsible Net citizens.
So this week we have solved the broadband issue, climate change and email spam. What’s for next week?
We have tons of folks using CrashPlan with great success to back up Entourage. We do them in place, byte differential. More info on how we compare to Time Machine is at
http://www.crashplan.com/features/timeMachine.vtl
Rod, I agree with not backing up your local mail cache. I do the same. I run an IMAP server in the network which is backed up. This backup is based on the Maildir format for file storage, so just performs incremental backups of the new mail files, thereby minimising disk usage. I treat my mail clients as thin and dumb.
To be honest, I’m not sure how much use restoring a backup of a local mail cache file would be when the first thing the client’s going to do when it fires up is sync with your server anyway.