Subscribe Feed (RSS)Online Business Tragedy: The Loss of My Email, Address Book & Calendar
June 11th, 2007 by Joshua Dorkin | Filed under Commentary, Entrepreneurship.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 . . .
I personally use Kontact with G-Mail. I have all of my e-mails also download into G-Mail, so if I loose them at one place they’re still at the other. Unfortunately I don’t know how I’ll import/export if one is lost, but at least I’ll still have the e-mails accessable somewhere.
Josh,
If you have a good backup of the data, or one that may be good but you are not sure, start calling the MAC shops in your neck of the woods. Odds are there are tools for Entourage just as there are for Outlook that can recover the data.
You probably will have to pay a couple of nickels for the work, but that is for you to determine how much it is worth. I have saved many an Outlook file the owner, who in the midst of a huge stress attack, could not see that they could be saved.
Good luck, I know it is a very difficult time.
Tom
Josh,
Sorry to hear about the mishap. A similar issue happened to me about six months ago with my previous ecommerce business. I ran Thunderbird on a POP3 account (huge mistake). To make a long story short the hard drive crashed and I wasn’t using a backup so everything was gone. Lesson learned.
Josh,
Did you sync your contact list with a PDA or other service? Losing the emails is tough but you will hear from the people you need to speak with fairly often. It is the contact list that has the most value. Using a Yahoo, GMail or other off-site account may be just for such emergencies. I would look at backups, restoration services and service centers for some help.
Telling you to backup frequently at this point is salt in your wound. I use an old computer for just such things. It just makes it easy.
Good luck. I once had to pay a few thousand dollars to recover data from a crashed disk. It was painful but worth it.
ONTRACK a data recovery firm saved my butt once. And, several people I know have used them. Not cheap, but the alternatives can be more expensive. After you’re back, I’d push everything thru gmail and use Plaxo for the contacts. imho, fjohn
http://www.weirdkid.com/
I never used them but they may do what you want and convert them to Thunderbird instead.
I used Google to find possible solutions
http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&client=firefox-a&rls=org.mozilla%3Aen-US%3Aofficial&hs=bI9&q=Entourage+email++convert+thunderbird&btnG=Search
You have the files and could see a cheap solution for you
Backup is the weakness point for many of us(me including).
I tell my clients: If you lose your data, would you nibble your fingers?(simple French translation)
Hey Josh,
Same thing just cost me $1400 to recover the data. I know that
sinking feeling…
Moving along…how’s life…?
JamesRREI
Hey Josh,
Were you running IMAP or POP3 on your server?
If POP3 - that is the reason those emails are gone. IMAP should keep them saved on the server, but if you pull them into your email browser of choice via POP3 they are removed from the server.
Hey all . . . thanks for the tips. I’ve been running POP3. How difficult is it to switch to IMAP? Any suggestions?
I definitely feel your pain. ouch.
Josh, not difficult at all. In Mozilla Thunderbird and MS Outlook it just takes a couple of mouse clicks when you add your email account into the program.
I had to reinstall Entourage and am having the same problem. I am going to stop using Entourage for email - It is too unstable anyway when you get a lot of email in it.