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:
- Some contacts without company names ended up with other records data in their empty fields.
- Some contacts without address data ended up with duplicate e-mail addresses
- Some contacts had their street fields abbreviated and the following fields (city, country, etc.) erased.
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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