Time Machine & Outlook

[24CTGoldie]

Hi All,

Let me give you some background on my issue before I blatantly ask a question that should and hopefully be answered easily.

I attempted to upgrade to Lion on release day, but ran into an issue where the installer said that my hard drive was broken and couldn't be repaired. I don't remember the exact issue it stated. 1 Apple Care representative said that I need to take my MBP in for a new hard drive, but I knew there was nothing wrong with it since it was working beautifully on Snow Leopard.

In a 9 hour period and 6 senior representatives later, I had to completely wipe my drive, reinstall Snow Leopard, install the updates, and install Lion again, which went fine the 2nd round. I ran migration assistant to import all of my time machine data and thought it went fine. However, I no longer have any contacts in Outlook or on my iPhone and iPad.

So, here's my question. In what file can I find my Outlook contacts from time machine? My "Address Book" doesn't have my most recent contacts in it so I can't export it and import it like I saw many others do. I attempted to open Outlook and open time machine, but it immediately takes me to finder and won't let me look at past Outlook backups.

Thoughts? I'm desperate.

 

[deadwulfe]

Are your old emails in Outlook? What email service did you use Outlook for (GMail, MS Exchange, Hotmail, Yahoo Mail)?

What perturbs me is that all of your contacts in your iPhone and iPad are gone. You must have synced these devices to your Mac, after the update without even checking that everything (Outlook) was working the same as before?

 

[24CTGoldie]

Are your old emails in Outlook? What email service did you use Outlook for (GMail, MS Exchange, Hotmail, Yahoo Mail)?

What perturbs me is that all of your contacts in your iPhone and iPad are gone. You must have synced these devices to your Mac, after the update without even checking that everything (Outlook) was working the same as before?

All my emails are syncing via MS Exchange.
I haven't synced either device since the Lion issue, but the contacts also don't appear in Outlook.

 

[deadwulfe]

Can you log into your email, via webmail (Safari or whatever browser you may use) and verify your contacts are still available?

Now I'm wondering if the Geniuses wiped out your Outlook contacts, because if they were deleted on the server, then that would explain why they would be deleted on devices accessing the Exchange server.

 

[24CTGoldie]

Can you log into your email, via webmail (Safari or whatever browser you may use) and verify your contacts are still available?

Now I'm wondering if the Geniuses wiped out your Outlook contacts, because if they were deleted on the server, then that would explain why they would be deleted on devices accessing the Exchange server.

They aren't on the Exchange server either via webmail.

 

[deadwulfe]

First off, I don't run Outlook for Mac. All of this is from memory from using Outlook on Windows, but read on. Assuming your contacts are just gone and no longer on the exchange server. Try doing this...

Go into the Time Machine backups to a date before all of this happened. You'll want to copy a backed up Outlook Identity to your desktop so you can individually restore your contacts to your existing Outlook Identity that doesn't have contacts. I'm assuming your last response implied that all of your emails are there, because of the syncing between Outlook and the Exchange server...

The Identity would be under /Users/username/Documents/Microsoft User Data/Office 2011 Identities/

It's suggested on one of the Outlook for Mac websites that you rename the Identity you just copied to your desktop, so you don't confuse the two. You'll want to go ahead and close out of the Time Machine screen and get back into Outlook to do the importing of contacts from the Identity you copied to your desktop. File -> Import? Afterwards, you may want to click on the Send and Receive button to force a sync between Outlook and Exchange. That should restore your contacts to the Exchange server...

 

[24CTGoldie]

But how would they be deleted from the server if they only erased my HDD?

 

[deadwulfe]

But how would they be deleted from the server if they only erased my HDD?

You had 6 different people spend 9 hours on your computer to do what would take half of the forum participants 3 hours to do by ourselves. I think it could have been any number of possible causes.

However, if I had to guess it would be to say that it was an attempt to diagnose and fix a software issue that may or may not have contributed to your problem and perhaps your contacts information was corrupted, corrected with deletion, and synced in an attempt to re-download the same info to a working spot on your hard drive. The tech may not have thought it through, logically, to realize that the timestamp for changes would have resulted in the data deletion uploading to the server and not downloading from Exchange.

I'm an Accountant, not an IT Pro, so all of that is completely out of my arse as a guess.

 

[24CTGoldie]

First off, I don't run Outlook for Mac. All of this is from memory from using Outlook on Windows, but read on. Assuming your contacts are just gone and no longer on the exchange server. Try doing this...

Go into the Time Machine backups to a date before all of this happened. You'll want to copy a backed up Outlook Identity to your desktop so you can individually restore your contacts to your existing Outlook Identity that doesn't have contacts. I'm assuming your last response implied that all of your emails are there, because of the syncing between Outlook and the Exchange server...

The Identity would be under /Users/username/Documents/Microsoft User Data/Office 2011 Identities/

It's suggested on one of the Outlook for Mac websites that you rename the Identity you just copied to your desktop, so you don't confuse the two. You'll want to go ahead and close out of the Time Machine screen and get back into Outlook to do the importing of contacts from the Identity you copied to your desktop. File -> Import? Afterwards, you may want to click on the Send and Receive button to force a sync between Outlook and Exchange. That should restore your contacts to the Exchange server...

The latest I can go back in the specific folder is July 21st when the incident happened on the 20th so that's out, even though I have backups prior to that.

 

[deadwulfe]

I'm assuming this is a company email account, to be using Exchange? If your company has an IT department, they are probably making daily backups of everything, so you could try contacting them ASAP to see if they can pull a copy of your contacts.

 

[24CTGoldie]

I'm assuming this is a company email account, to be using Exchange? If your company has an IT department, they are probably making daily backups of everything, so you could try contacting them ASAP to see if they can pull a copy of your contacts.

Guess that would be my next best bet, but I'm not technically supposed to use exchange on my mac, but I can ask. Thanks for trying!

 

[deadwulfe]

Guess that would be my next best bet, but I'm not technically supposed to use exchange on my mac, but I can ask. Thanks for trying!

You probably don't even need to mention that. Just tell them your contacts are gone, you don't know what to do and if they can restore them for you. Once they do that, then you should see your contacts reappear on all of your devices. IT support staff don't like to ask more questions than they need to, because they'd rather be doing something else.

I wish I had some other methods for you to try, but I'm all tapped out. Hopefully you get it all worked out!