Pilot non-syncing

Regular readers will know that I synchronise my collection of PDAs to Microsoft Schedule+, as this has the widest range of support from third parties for different PDAs. For the calendar applications this works very well, and for most PDAs addresses also synchronise well. The biggest problem is that the Psion Series 5 still doesn't support address book synchronisation. Some PDA contact managers only support a single address, whereas others keep home and work addresses.

Trying to keep up with all of the third party synchronisation managers is impossible, so most weeks I will install, uninstall and reinstall one or more new product. At some point during the course of this I managed to wipe out all the contacts I keep in Schedule+. As a matter of principle I don't care for applications that don't warn me of the changes they are about to make, and if I only knew which one was responsible for this massacre, I'd have nothing more to do with it. I was expecting that when I put everything back to normal, with Intellisync connected to the PalmPilot, the contacts would be restored from the Pilot, or at worse it would offer to delete everything on the Pilot. That's good, because the Pilot HotSync system used with Intellisync lets you run in a very cautious mode. However, it just silently ignored three hundred contacts sitting in my Pilot, and happily synchronised the half dozen that I had manually entered into Schedule+ by way of my Hewlett-Packard HP620LX. Until you have experienced it, it is hard to imagine just how disturbing it is to watch most of your address book contents teetering on the edge of an electronic disaster.

My answer to this was to create a new Schedule+ file and resync with my Pilot, which worked. It would seem that there is some flag kept in Schedule+ that the Pilot HotSync manager uses to determine when a record has been changed. Another option would have been to edit the records one by one on the Pilot, and resync again, which should have worked.

Words and design by:
Paul Lynch
Last updated: February 6, 1998