How to Rebuild Entourage Database By Using Inbuilt Utility?

Summary: Entourage Database may show unexpected behavior under some circumstances thus requiring database repair. You may use the inbuilt Entourage Repair Utility to rebuild Entourage database.

Entourage is an email client and personal information manager from Microsoft that offers extensive support for Exchange Server 2007 SP1, rollup 4, or higher. The Entourage identity database is a component of an information store that stores user mailbox data such as messages, tasks, notes, and appointments in various User Folders. With time, as data keeps on getting saved or deleted from the user mailbox, random waste spaces are created within the information store. Such wasted spaces can lead to inconsistencies within the database which ultimately add up to the database integrity threats.

An inconsistent database often shows unexpected behaviour such as crashing, freezing, barring access to mail folders, etc. If you face any such issue with your Entourage database, you can rebuilt it using the inbuilt Entourage Repair utility. Follow the steps below ?

Step 1: Quit all Entourage related processes

1. On your Mac, press the Command + Option + Esc keys together to launch Activity Monitor. You may also use Spotlight or Alfred to launch Activity Monitor.
2. In the list of applications running, select all Entourage processes one by one and click on ?Force Quit? for each
3. Close the Activity Monitor

Step 2: Verify that you have enough Disk Space for the rebuild

To successfully Rebuild Entourage database, you should have thrice the amount of disk space of your database identity folder free on the hard disk. To find out how much of disk space is free, do the following:

1. Open Entourage Identity Folder through Finder
2. Go to ?File? -> ?Get Info? -> ?Get Information?

Supposing your identity folder?s size is 500 MB, you should have at least 1.5 GB of free hard disk space to proceed.

Step 3: Take a complete backup

Backup your current database identity folder using the following steps:

1. In Finder, go to ?Go? -> ?Home? -> ?Documents? -> ?Microsoft User Data Folder?
2. Double-click on ?Office <version> Identities? folder
3. Right-click on the identity folder and select ?Duplicate?
4. When the duplication is done, close all windows

Step 4: Rebuild Database

Note: The below mentioned steps are applicable to Entourage 2008 / 2004.

Follow these steps to use Entourage database rebuild utility:

1. Ensure all Entourage applications are closed. To be on a safer side, close all other applications too
2. Re-launch Entourage with the Option key pressed. Keep holding the key down until the ?Database Utility? window appears
3. In the window, select the database?s Main Identity
4. Click ?Rebuild Database? and then click on ?Continue?
5. The rebuild process may take some time depending upon the database identity size. You will be able to see the progress of the rebuild in the window. When the process completes, you should see the message ?Your database was successfully rebuilt?
6. Click on ?Close? and then click on ?Quit?

Restart Entourage to verify that the problem has been fixed. If it still exists, it might mean your Entourage database has multiple identities one of which is damaged. In this case, you?ll need to create a new identity to fix the issue. Here?s how ?

Creating New Entourage Identity

Follow the steps below:

1. Launch Activity Monitor and quit all Entourage and MS Office applications (including reminders)
2. Search for Entourage identity folder using the below-mentioned command and copy it to the desktop:

HD/Users/USER_NAME/Documents/Microsoft User Data/Office <version> Identities/IDENTITY_NAME

1. Launch Entourage and go to ?Menu? -> ?Switch Identity?
2. Click on ?New? and give the new identity a name in the ?Identity Name? box
3. Quit Entourage
4. Again search for the Entourage identity folder using the following command and rename it to the new name you specified:

HD/Users/USER_NAME/Documents/Microsoft User Data/Office <version> Identities/NEW_IDENTITY_NAME

1. Copy the database file that you copied to the desktop earlier to the NEW_IDENTITY_NAME folder that you just created

This should ideally fix the problem. However, if it still persists, read on to discover a sure-shot solution.

Conclusion: 

Entourage database is generally quite robust and doesn?t get damaged easily. However, if it does, you can easily repair it using the above-mentioned procedures.

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