How to Restore Entourage Files After a Time Machine Backup

Microsoft Entourage is a task manager, email client, calendar and address book program designed specifically for Mac OS X, and was first introduced in Microsoft Office 2008. The program is clearly very capable, and is designed to handle the more managerial tasks you face from day to day. If you wish to back up all of this information, you can do so with Time Machine, OS X’s built-in backup utility. Restoring old Entourage files is just as easy as it was to back them up in the first place.

Instructions

1. Plug your Time Machine-enabled hard drive into your Mac.

2. Click the "Finder" icon in your dock. Select the "Applications" folder and double-click "Time Machine" to launch it. A single Finder window will appear and your desktop will animate off screen. There will be a timeline on the right-hand side of the screen, representing your backups.

3. Select “Documents” from the Sources menu on the left-hand side of the Finder window. From here, click “Microsoft User Data>Office 2008 Identities>Main Identity.”

4. Scroll through your backup timeframe (how far back your backups go) using the arrow keys on the right-hand side of the screen. Find the date from which you wish to back up. From here, click the file named “Database” once, and then click “Restore.” Allow Time Machine to back up the file.

Tips & Warnings

• Time Machine backs files up on a file basis, not bit basis. Entourage uses one massive database to store all of the files it accesses. Seeing as Entourage is an application that is typically used on a daily basis, its database is changed very often, meaning Time Machine will back it up every time it changes. This has the potential to eat up lots of data very quickly.

References

• Entourage Help: Location of Microsoft Files