Saturday, February 26, 2005

Missing Sync Memo Conduit

I made an extraordinary discovery this morning: my Memo database has 1113 records. Last time I checked there were 31 and I have only added one since! Looking in the 'Unfiled' and '!Archive' categories I found scores of duplicates.

I think the culprit is The Missing Sync. Bundled with their Mac software is a desktop MemoPad and a conduit: very useful for those who want to use iCal rather than PalmDesktop. When I had the T|E I had several tussles with the conduit for this: it duplicated all my categories and moved the memos from the old category to the new one with the same name. Since I had more than eight categories, it was unable to duplicate all of them, so it simply shoved all the memos from several categories into 'Unfiled', requiring a manual recategorization memo by memo. I reported this to Mark/Space but they never did anything about it.

Anyway, this did not happen with the Treo, so I assumed it was something to do with the enhanced PIMs and went back to using their MemoPad and conduit. That was clearly a mistake. What must be happening is that, because I am Hotsync-ing to two Macs (and at the moment doing it 10 or more times a day as I try out lots of software for the Treo) it keeps thinking that the memos have been changed since they have a different backup time. So it makes duplicates. That is my guess, though there is nothing in the Hotsync Log to say this is happening.

I think I will have to go back to iPalmMemo, which is not perfect because it does not keep the two Macs in sync, but at least it never messes with the database on the Palm.