Ok . . . maybe it wouldn’t be a tragedy for most people, but yesterday I lost 7,000+ emails from the past 6 months or so! If these had been personal emails, I would not have been so upset, but these were emails for my business. Actually, not only did I lose my emails, but I lost all of my contacts and all of my appointments. You see, Entourage (the Mac version of Outlook) went on the fritz yesterday.

I was having problems with Excel and tried to reinstall it. Once I did that, I began to get errors from Entourage telling me the version of Entourage I was running was not compatible with my data files. Just a note: I still have the files containing all of my data, but I have no way to access these. . . .

I tried everything! I un-installed Excel . . didn’t work. I un-installed and reinstalled Office 2004 . . . didn’t work. I figured that I had to check my emails and decided to use Mozilla Thunderbird to at lest see what was going on. When it loaded, I noticed that there were only 113 messages on my server. There should have been many thousands! I quickly logged into the server to see that every message that should have been there was gone!

I’m not sure if it was Entourage or Thunderbird, but I’m now missing backups of every email I wanted to keep for the past 1.5 years. I can’t access my old emails because Entourage is on the fritz, and I’m flipping out! Any thoughts? Any ideas?

Some people might say that it offers a fresh start, but the amount of data I’m missing will certainly affect my business for weeks or even months to come.

I’m just at a complete loss of words now . . .