Microsoft office X entourage

Question

I use entourage in microsoft office X for my e-mail and I would like to back up important e-mails on a fire wire drive. Can somone tell me how to do that? when I drag the icon onto the firewire drive I get a message that says it cannot read the libraries.
thanks,
BF

Answer 1

Hi brian,
You just need to back up the Main Identity folder. In your user account, back up the folder:
~/Documents/Microsoft User Data/Office 2004 Identities/Main Identity/
Yours, or course, won't say 2004 in the folder name. I can't remember what Office X names the folder, but it's similar.
If you want to get the size of the backup smaller, launch Entourage while holding down the Option key. This will bring up the Database Utility. Turn on the radio button for "Compact database" and click Continue. The reason for this is when you remove items from the Deleted folder, they are not actually removed from the database, but rather moved to an inaccesible part of the file. Compacting the database actually removes the deleted items. After quitting the Database Utility, launch Entourage again to make sure your new database is okay. If it is, go into the "Office x Identities" folder and delete the folder named as a backup. Then archive your "Main Identity" folder.