[iYeat]

I backed up my OE Identities folder to a CD. When I went to restore the backup from the CD, I get an error when I try to copy one of my messages files!!! HELPP!!! I need this file!!

Thanks.

C

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[John]

iYeat....

When you say that you get an error when trying to copy the message file to your hard drive, do you mean you get a MacOS error message?

Or do you mean that you get an error from Outlook Express?

Need to know this info to further diagnose the problem.

John

[iYeat]

Here is what I do, step by step..

1) Open up the CD and navigate to the folder containing my OE Identities.

2) Copy my identity folder called "yeat" to my new identities folder on my HD.

3) After 214.7 MB has been copied (the same place every time), I get the following error:

The item "Messages" cannot be read, because a disk error occurred. Do you want to continue?

4) I click continue and the rest of the files copy.

5) I open up OE on my HD and I can see the list of messages in the top pane (ie, subject, to, sent, status, etc). But when I go to view the message content, it remains blank. I think this is probably because there was an error copying that messages file...


Any ideas??

THANKS!!

-C

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[John]

Then it sounds like this is a MacOS problem, not an OE problem, and the topic should be moved to the MacOS forum or perhaps the Third Party Software forum, since that's what I'm going to suggest you use to fix the problem.

1) The file that you burned to the CD is not a good copy. There is probably a bad sector or bad piece of binary data on the CD that is causing your files to not copy back to the Hard Drive.

2) This illustrates why you should always manually verfiy each CD burn by trying to drag the files on the CD back to your HD after the burn, just so you <b> know </b> that they work.

3) You can try a few things to recover some of that Database, though I'm not sure any of them will work:

a) Drag each file inside the Indentities folder on your CD to the Desktop/Hard Drive individually, that way you'll know exactly which file it is that is corrupted.

b) after you have all but the corrupted file on your local disk, try opening that corrupted file on the CD with BBEdit. It should get most of the info from that file. Then save that BBEdit file to your HD with the same name that is used on the CD. CD:Identities:Messages -> HD:Identities:Messages.

Now try using that Identites folder with OE.

if that doesn't work:
Use Norton to recover that file from the CD... might not work at all.

if that doesn't work:
try dragging the corrupted file onto OE... and see what it will do for you on it's own.

if that doesn't work:
Try calling MS tech support (that most likely won't work either)

In the future, I suggest backing up OE messages by highlighting and dragging eacch message from OR to the desktop so that you have each message saved as an OE message on your desktop... Then burn a CD of all of the individual messages, as it saves you all the effort of backing up a large folder. You can also index the CD image then and use Sherlock to search it.

Good luck