Prevent P800 and iSync 1.1 Corruptions

Jul 03, '03 10:16:00AM

Contributed by: emarmite

I spent a lot of time trying to get my P800 to work with iSync properly. After sorting the firewall issue (see other Apple discussion forums for more info - you have to open ports 3000-3004 in your firewall, you can only sync one bluetooth device at a time if you are using the D-Link USB adapter, make sure you back up three ways and to CD-R, etc.), I even upgraded the handset BIOS and completely reset (a.k.a. erased) the thing. However, I still routinely experienced data corruption after syncing:

Even worse, iSync would attempt to overwrite my Address book with these corruptions on the second sync. At least it warned me in time so that I could stop things from getting any worse. So I gave up for a few weeks. Today I took another look at things and realized that the problem was only experienced on those fields which contained a Carriage Return in them. Once I removed them, things worked beautifully (for contacts at least).

Furthermore, these CRs were only in there because I had exported my data from Outlook to Entourage to Address Book using some AppleScripts availble on VersionTracker. I suspect I would never have typed CRs when entering these records.

NOTE: If you are planning to remove CRs in your records, first, make a backup and secondly, use the forward delete (function + delete) when removing the CRs from your fields. Using just the delete key seems to trigger a bug in Address Book.

This very conveniently explains why some people had a perfect experience with P800/iSync and others had a terrible one. If you had only entered contacts on your P800 and/or had not used Carriage Returns, and had no firewall turned on, it would have worked first time. If my theory is correct, it would explain why less-techie users had no problems, while more technical users had a much harder time. Doesn't explain how this got past the testing though....

Hope this is of help to any long-suffering P800 users out there still trying to get this to work.

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