Apologies in advance for a rather complicated question.... I screwed up, I think. Trying to see if I can salvage 7 years of email. I'll ask this on the MS forum as well, but you folks tend to rock....
I had a complete system crash. Had good backups and have on my hard drives (TM and External) all files. I had to reinstall Office 2011, however, from scratch.
1. Discovered in move to new home that my original install disk was damaged - ouch.
2. Called MS support and they were great. I had registered my copy and they sent new replacement disk within a couple of days (excellent service, btw).
3. This is where I screwed up. I thought I could reinstall Office with new disk, then pull my Outlook main identity folder over, as I've had to do a couple of times in the past without issue, and which is described in several places on the web.
4. Nope. Not only that, but on my external CCC backup copy, I had been able to open the old identity independent of the new system. No more, suddenly. My intent was to go in and export everything for transfer to new Outlook. Restoring identity from TM also doesn't take.
5. What I want from the old is a carefully maintained set of mail folders with seven years of archived work messages.
6. I still have the old identity (a couple of copies actually) and I can see that it is the correct size indicating the material is present. I just can't access it.
Any suggestions about retrieving my archive? This is not a total disaster, fortunately. I'm on an Exchange server and all recent email is still on the server, so I have everything I need for my current work. I'm just really sad to lose such a great resource I've been building up for years.
Maybe a hard lesson learned that even with great backups, sometimes a unique set of circumstances arise that throw a curve ball at us.... I should have thought to export files before installing the new Office Suite. Alas, hindsight.
I had a complete system crash. Had good backups and have on my hard drives (TM and External) all files. I had to reinstall Office 2011, however, from scratch.
1. Discovered in move to new home that my original install disk was damaged - ouch.
2. Called MS support and they were great. I had registered my copy and they sent new replacement disk within a couple of days (excellent service, btw).
3. This is where I screwed up. I thought I could reinstall Office with new disk, then pull my Outlook main identity folder over, as I've had to do a couple of times in the past without issue, and which is described in several places on the web.
4. Nope. Not only that, but on my external CCC backup copy, I had been able to open the old identity independent of the new system. No more, suddenly. My intent was to go in and export everything for transfer to new Outlook. Restoring identity from TM also doesn't take.
5. What I want from the old is a carefully maintained set of mail folders with seven years of archived work messages.
6. I still have the old identity (a couple of copies actually) and I can see that it is the correct size indicating the material is present. I just can't access it.
Any suggestions about retrieving my archive? This is not a total disaster, fortunately. I'm on an Exchange server and all recent email is still on the server, so I have everything I need for my current work. I'm just really sad to lose such a great resource I've been building up for years.
Maybe a hard lesson learned that even with great backups, sometimes a unique set of circumstances arise that throw a curve ball at us.... I should have thought to export files before installing the new Office Suite. Alas, hindsight.