OK, I'm not really the kind to write retractions on my blog, or to redact text in a blog entry that has turned out to be incorrect. The joy of web 2.0 is that you can change the past if you need to, as long as no one checks the Google cache.
However, in this case, I think I do need to explicitly say something: I was wrong, and I'm sorry.
I haven't posted in over a month because of a crazy work schedule. Last week was supposed to mark the first step towards a return to sanity, but then my laptop suffered from a gypsy curse (long story) and over the course of two trips to the Apple Store, I learned how much Apple's "safe sleep"... isn't.
However, this isn't about Apple, although I'm still plenty steamed at them. It's about the end of my love affair with Entourage. And how I'm mad at myself for falling for Microsoft technology once again. Let's face it, folks: Office, XP, and of course now Vista, have never been the most stable of products. While Macs don't "just work" all the time either, there's a lot more you can do to recover one, since the underpinnings are UNIX based. However, you have to be a do-it-yourselfer; the Apple Geniuses can't help you with a lot of the voodoo stuff that Apple can't endorse.
So Entourage is sexy and does 90% of what I want in an organizer and email program, which is, as you know from my last post, a lot more than can be said for Apple's built-in products. However, Entourage has one fatal flaw: it stores all of your information in a single database file! This means that if that file goes kerplooey, your contacts, addresses, to-dos, and ALL YOUR EMAIL is gone gone gone! And what was the one file on my hard drive that was difficult to recover? The Entourage database.
Some reading on the 'net (which I wish I'd done BEFORE I embraced this product) revealed this is a known problem, and furthermore, that Entourage databases don't allow themselves to be backed up by systems like Time Capsule (which I'm buying as soon as I can). You can manually back up the Entourage database using a tool built into Entourage. However, this isn't 100% effective, and neither is the "database repair" tool, which kept crapping out when I tried to use it.
The end result? I lost about 10% of my email from 2008. I consider this a pretty low amount compared to what COULD have happened, and luckily my Inbox and my business messages were almost all intact. I did, however, lose EVERY message from my friends that I had filed in my "friends" folder over the last 9 months. So to folks with whom I recently connected or reconnected... if you don't hear from me, write to me, because it may just be that I lost your address!
Anyway, steps I am taking to prevent this from happening again:
1) Switching back to the Apple built-in products. They may have their weaknesses but I'm going to learn to live with them like the millions of iPhone users out there.
2) Getting Time Capsule and making sure that my computer is backing up regularly.
3) Using IMAP to store my inbox both in Gmail AND locally on my computer so that I can compose email offline as I like, but I can also still dig up current email when I'm not at my computer... or when my computer is not working, on the off chance another gypsy curses it.
OK now to get back to catching up on a week of lost work. Yes, a week. Will I ever get a break?
