Freeing up time the wrong way

I’ve been tinkering with Event Calendar 3, a great WordPress iCalendar server plugin so I can easily serve up important community events to my neighbors. Part of this is testing it with various calendar clients like Exchange. Since I don’t have Windows running anywhere in the house, I thought I’d try the next best thing: Kelly’s Mac with Microsoft Entourage 2004 installed.

Entourage suffers from Microsoft’s peculiar habit of putting all its eggs in one basket. All Kelly’s email, events, tasks, and contacts live in one big file called (wait for it!) “Database.” If anything happens to that one file, you’re screwed. Back to that in a moment.

I found what looked like an iCal option in Entourage’s Calendar, so I found Sync Services and chose the iCal option. One dialog box, asking how I should sync things, popped up and confused me. I checked the wrong option and before I could figure out what was happening, all of Kelly’s events since 2007 were being deleted from her calendar!

While I should’ve read the dialog box more closely, I should’ve also been presented with a better explanation for what was going to take place. And a good warning dialog saying “Are you sure?” would’ve been welcome. Instead, it took off without me being offered a chance to stop it. Not cool.

As for the mega “Database” file, it winds up wasting space with a lot of empty records. And the only way to recover any data stored inside is to restore the file from backups. This should’ve been as easy as replacing the current file with one from the DVD backup, but no: I replaced the file two times and no new events showed up. The trick here is to restore the files into a new identity, export them from there, and then reimport them into your Main Identity.

Long story short, what should’ve been a five minute test turned out to be a few hours of work putting things back together. Kelly had to replace only a month’s worth of events, so the damage was limited. What a totally unavoidable headache, though!