Re: [Fed-Talk] Microsoft Office for Mac 2011 - flat file or database?!
Re: [Fed-Talk] Microsoft Office for Mac 2011 - flat file or database?!
- Subject: Re: [Fed-Talk] Microsoft Office for Mac 2011 - flat file or database?!
- From: "Dan O'Donnell" <email@hidden>
- Date: Thu, 14 Oct 2010 09:03:26 -0700
- Thread-topic: [Fed-Talk] Microsoft Office for Mac 2011 - flat file or database?!
Quoted in portion from a review article of Outlook for Mac 2011 in Macworld,
written by John C. Welch. See portion/section "The database" in:
<http://www.macworld.com/reviews/product/671493/review/outlook_for_mac_2011.
html>
--begin quote--
Entourage's database was a big file that changed constantly, which made for
painful backups. The big news in Outlook 2011 is that there is a new way of
dealing with Outlook items, and each item is stored as an individual file or
fileshowever, there¹s still a database.
According to the Outlook development team, the database is there purely to
optimize search and other non-essential routines. So what would happen if I
deleted the database? After quitting Outlook 2011 and the Database Daemon
process, I deleted the database file and restarted Outlook 2011. The program
popped a message saying that since I had restored from Time Machine,
(amusingly, this message is hardcoded into Outlook 2011 based on the
assumption that the only time you¹re going to have all the individual files
and no database is after a Time Machine restore), it was going to rebuild
the database, which it did. The database is not only non-critical, it's much
smaller; in my case, my Entourage Database is under 5.5GB, and my Outlook
2011 database is over 500MB. Not a bad reduction, and you can ignore it
completely for backups.
Time Machine support is a mixed bag. Because everything is in individual
files, once you¹ve done your initial backup, then any changes only require
backing up those changes, (just make sure you exclude the Outlook 2011
database from Time Machine.) However, there¹s no actual Time Machine
integration, a la Apple Mail
<http://www.macworld.com/reviews/product/593178/review/mail_43.html> ().
And due to the requirements of Spotlight and others, the deeper folder
structure is incomprehensible. For example, to get to my signatures, the
folder path is /Volumes/jwelch/Documents/Microsoft User Data/Office 2011
Identities/Main Identity/Data Records/Signatures/0T/0B/0M/0K/not the things
easy selective restores are made of.
The Outlook development team acknowledged that doing a partial restore, such
as a single message or a single contact, would be quite tedious. In this
release of Outlook, the restore is all or nothing, but a lot better than the
state of Time Machine with Entourage. For anyone in a business or
educational setting, where you¹re using Portable Home Directory (PHD) sync,
I noticed no problems with PHD sync at all. In a quick comparison, the
synchronization works as it does for Apple Mail as long as you exclude the
Outlook 2011 database.
Bringing in data from Entourage was a snap. Accounts, rules, signatures,
e-mail, events, contacts, categories, and so forth, all imported without a
problem on the first try. Importing from other programs was similarly
pain-free. I also tried dragging a few thousand messages that existed only
as .eml files into a folder in Outlook 2011; it took a while, but they all
imported correctly. The only caveat about importing is that if the Entourage
Database Daemon is not running, the Entourage import may fail. I did not
test .pst file imports.
--end quote--
On 10/14/10 8:55 AM, "Don Montalvo" <email@hidden> wrote:
> Ok, so I finally got a chance to dig into the new "flat file" structure used
> by Outlook 2011.
>
> I see individual files in these two directories:
>
> ~/Documents/Microsoft\ User\ Data/Office\ 2011\ Identities/Main\
> Identity/Data\ Records/Message\ Sources/
>
> ~/Documents/Microsoft\ User\ Data/Office\ 2011\ Identities/Main\
> Identity/Data\ Records/Messages/
>
> ...much to my surprise I also found a Database file that was 29M (used a
> temporary account for testing so it was small):
>
> ~/Documents/Microsoft User Data/Office 2011 Identities/Main Identity/Database
>
> ...well, I decided to send myself a 5M attachment. Much to my dismay, the
> database balooned up to 34M.
>
> Very scary.....
>
> Thanks,
> Don _______________________________________________
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