I had insanely huge database to recover for a company's director who I work for. He kept almost everything for last five years. Since he deals with many design work, he had a lot of big attachment files. His Entourage database became 26GB and it now corrupted. (Of course... I know the size is unbelievable...) He uses Entourage 2008 on Mac 10.5.

Whatever I tried didn't work and it took for ages to apply one solution as the database was just TOO BIG! After I spent for a few weeks of trying, I decided to go with EntourAid. I received a license as soon as I paid off through PayPal. That was pretty quick and easy, and I had no problem with the process.

I tried to split the 26GB file with the Splitter but didn't do anything, i.e., didn't work. I left the program running (? Not sure it was doing anything) over night. Next morning, the screen was the same as previous day. It was just too big for anything. So I sent an email to http://www.thepropellerheads.com/ for an advice and they replied to me on the same day. (I'm located in NZ so I assume there are some time differences but if you are in the same time zone, I'm sure Sol will reply to your email quicker than the same day!)

Sol advised me to run a command line. Here is her email.

=================
Splitter is only a user-friendly interface for a command inherent in OS X, however we've been getting reports of problems running Splitter in OS X Tiger. Instead of using Splitter, this may help: our resident geek filmed a short movie on how to use terminal to split a file

http://www.thepropellerheads.com/dumpstuff/

It’s a quicktime zipped file; 3 MB or so.

The files will be saved in your Home folder (usually denoted by the House icon) as xaa, xab, xac... Etc.

Note that in the instruction " split -b 40m", 40m means 40 megabytes, meaning each segment will be 40 megabytes. So you can actually change the size of each segment by changing "40m" to something else, for example: "100m" for 100 megabytes.

=================

The command line I was advised to run worked perfectly. It was a very quick job too. I wish I knew this before I used the Splitter and it was stated as a troubleshooting for the tool on their website.

I initially split the 26GB database into 1GB and 100MB, and they were split well but didn't successfully import into Entourage.

So I sent another email to Sol for any advices and I was told to split smaller. 40MB segment was perfectly imported back to the Entourage. (FINALLY)

Here is another reply from Sol.

===============
Progress!

1/ for the first segment, try splitting into smaller parts 2/ seriously, a 26 GB file is insanely huge; and importing 1 GB at a time back into Entourage or Apple Mail is pretty scary! Do it manually.

For Entourage, go to File>Import>Import from Text File>Mbox formatted file. Give it time, the recovered messages should appear as a sub-folder of your Inbox 3/ For Apple Mail, similar process: File>Import Mailboxes>mbox... Etc

Good luck
===============

Probably it would be great idea to be documented on their website, i.e., what the recommendation segment sizes are.

Some 40MB segments recover 0 email but at least we get some email back, it’s more than helpful. I think this isn’t the tool’s ability, it is my user’s email must got something really big attachment over 40MB. I remember I saw only 1 email was recovered when I was running a recovery program on 1GB segment.

I received some error messages while using the Spliter and EntoAid:

AppleScriptError
Split 2.792463899E+9: illegal byte count (64)

Can’t get text 108 thru -1 “eturn-url=order%2dhistory%2dfiltered&page=help@fya%2dsign%2din%2dsecure%2ehtml&opt=ab&method=POST\”>Access”

If you have a trouble using this program or payment, you should email to info@thepropellerheads.com. Because you will hear from them straight away within 24 hours. (well, my cases were all well turning around time.) What I suggest you to do are: split the database by command, keep the segments a lot smaller, import the .mbox file manually from the menu rather than dragging .mbox into the Email application. If you have no luck, email them.

Sol from the Propeller Heads supported me very well. All responds were reasonable quick and always within 24 hours or a lot less. My questions were well answered, never been ignored and I was even encouraged too.

I definitely recommend anyone who has a trouble with a corrupted Entourage database. This now proved that it can even fix a big file such as 26GB (!!!!) Entourage database.

In addition, the interface and process are very simple and easy which is always great thing about the application.

So thank you so much for your support and great tool. Both my user and I are appreciated deeply.