Question from “S”: My email accounts are all on a POP server (do not want to go with ‘gmail’ because of Google’s propensity for collecting & storing personal information) and I use Entourage.  Thus, I sometimes need to take a copy of my Entourage-stored contacts and calendar to another computer.  I know Entourage’s export feature; however, where are the emails, contacts, and calendar actually stored on my computer?  Could I just copy them to a flash drive and open them on another Mac?  Thanks, Jason, for this blog – I have been using Macs since my 512 model and have actually learned a couple of new things from the blog.

Jason answers: Hello and thanks for the kind words!

Depending on what version of Office you are running, the folder will be named accordingly. So, for Office 2008, the path to this database is: Hard Disk Name/Users/your_user_name/Documents/Microsoft User Data/Office 2008 Identities/Main Identity

For Office 2004 or Office 2011, you will see Office #### Identities.

The Main Identity is the default identity, but you can have multiple identities. If you have more than one identity, you will see more than just the Main Identity folder within the Identities folder. Inside these identity folders, you will see a “Database” file. This “Database” file contains all your email, email attachments, contacts, and calendar information. It can become quite large, we have seen Entourage databases that are several gigabytes in size.

We haven’t seen this after Office 2008 came out, but Entourage 2004 had some issues with large databases getting corrupted and people losing all the data within them. Again, Entourage 2008 seemed to resolve these issues.

With Office 2011, Entourage has been replaced with Outlook For Mac. Outlook For Mac still maintains the Identies folder, but in addition to the Database, it has an Outlook Data Folder that contains emails, contacts, and calendar items as individual files rather than everything in one big database. You can still move the Identity folder to another computer.

– Jason