Entourage 2008 and Time Machine are not good friends

The New Entourage 2008, scheduled for release in January 2008, is not a nice player when it comes to Time Machine. If you back up your Entourage files, your backup drive could run out of space in a matter of weeks.

Entourage stores every single file it uses in one huge database file, and whenever you make a change to anything Entourage, whether it is changing one number in the time of your coffee date with your ex, or completely erasing every message your ex ever sent you, that Entourage database is changed.

The way Time Machine makes backups is it looks at all the files on your system, and backs up only the files that have changed since your last backup. It then melds these together so that the end useer appears to be moving through entire backups of their files. The problem comes when you put this paragraph and the previous together.

Whenever you change the Entourage database, Time Machine backs it up. The whole thing. All of it’s many Gigabytes. Every hour. This can rack up.

Microsoft’s answer to this problem is to not back up your Entourage database.

Hopefully this will be addressed as Time Machine gets better and better.