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BrianBaughn

macrumors G4
Original poster
Feb 13, 2011
10,199
2,711
Baltimore, Maryland
This is just a cautionary story for those who might be able to benefit from the knowledge.

We had a client doing two relevant things:
  1. Upgrading to a new laptop
  2. Upgrading Microsoft Office 2011 to MS Office 2016
The client uses Outlook for email. It’s an IMAP account but the online storage limit is low so they move a lot of emails into folders “On My Computer”.

Transfer to new laptop done at the Apple Store. Purchase and installation of Office 2016 done at the Apple Store. When the client received the new computer it did not have Office 2011 on it.

We had to import the data from the Office 2011 “User Identity” that was still in the client’s documents folder and it seemed to work well. After deciding that all of the documents made the transition the client requested we wipe the old computer and reinstall a fresh system in preparation of donating the laptop.

Move ahead a few days and the client notices that one of the “On My Computer” folders has no email in it. We still have the old Outlook 2011 Identity data in two places (User’s Documents and on an external drive) so we create a new Mac User Account to see if reimporting the data yields the same result. The email folder was still empty.

So, the next thing we think of is to try importing from older Identity files in the TM backup. This is where we discover that Time Machine doesn’t back up the User Identity database file…just the folder with the data in it. This is important as Outlook 2016 can’t import an older version of the data without the database nor can it rebuild the database from the folder as it uses a wholly new format to store user data.

The solution for this was to reinstall Office 2011 and use it to rebuild the databases from recent Time Machine backups then until the lost emails were found. This we were able to do but I have seen many people that do not have their licensing info for Office 2011 and can’t get it to run on a new computer migration or even a new hard drive clone.

Anyone bored enough to have read this is invited to comment!
 
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