Tuesday, May 14, 2002
ActiveSync is Evil, Part 1
Posted by Jason Dunn in "THOUGHT" @ 11:01 PM
In the past week, I've had two major data losses, all courtesy of ActiveSync. There's simply no other way to say this: ActiveSync is the worst piece of Microsoft software I've encountered in my entire life. Never have I encountered an application capable of such wanton destruction of data. It's like a poisonous viper - you think you know what you're doing with it, but the slightest misstep, and you're dead. I'll write up the REALLY bad one later today, but here's what just happened to me last night. I'm still pondering the issue, half in shock.
I had reformatted my hard drive on Saturday, and I've spent a few days installing XP, all my apps, and getting things tweaked the way I like them. Over the past few days, I've been using Pocket Excel to create a technology budget for my church. I also took an inventory of all the computers they have - I spent around four hours on both of the documents. Today I installed ActiveSync, thinking "This should be nice and clean." I docked my Jornada 565, and it recognized that I had a previous partnership (from before the format). I told it that I wanted to only partner with this computer (thus deleting the previous partnership data). It then went ahead and compared the data on the Pocket PC and on the desktop. As I knew it would, it recognized that there was different data on the Pocket PC vs. the desktop. It gave me the deadly prompt: "Combine, replace, or remove?"
One would think that "Combine" would be the good thing to do, but as anyone who has done that several times will tell you, you'll end up with massive duplication of your data - and there's also a mysterious birthday shifting bug that will sometimes move all your birthdays off by one day. I've seen this happen time and time again. The screen shot above shows "Favorites, Files" because I had to sync my iPAQ 3870 in order to get this screen shot - when I docked the Jornada, it prompted me for action on "Calendar, Tasks, Inbox, and Contacts" - no mention of Files or Favourites. Since I knew I had added no new contacts, appointments, email or tasks - only the two Excel files - I thought it was safe to chose "Replace" as the option. It would simply replace all PIM data, and sync the files from the Pocket PC to the desktop PC. Right? Wrong.
It purged all the new files from the My Documents folder on the Pocket PC, deleting the two Excel files I had created. There's no trace of the data - I checked in this folder, which keeps copies of deleted synchronized data:
C:\Documents and Settings\ Jason Dunn \ Application Data\ Microsoft\ ActiveSync\ Profiles\ LittleShogun\ Synchronized Files Backup
But I discovered it only keeps track of documents on the PC, not on the Pocket PC. So, incredibly, I've lost both those Excel files and can't get them back. Why did ActiveSync delete files when I only told it to replace PIM data? Why doesn't it prompt the user when it's about to destroy data? I'm really kicking myself because I was going to make a copy of the My Documents folder on the Pocket PC just in case, but I thought "Nah, I know what I'm doing" - famous last words. Have you ever lost data due to ActiveSync? How did it happen? Vote in the poll!
I had reformatted my hard drive on Saturday, and I've spent a few days installing XP, all my apps, and getting things tweaked the way I like them. Over the past few days, I've been using Pocket Excel to create a technology budget for my church. I also took an inventory of all the computers they have - I spent around four hours on both of the documents. Today I installed ActiveSync, thinking "This should be nice and clean." I docked my Jornada 565, and it recognized that I had a previous partnership (from before the format). I told it that I wanted to only partner with this computer (thus deleting the previous partnership data). It then went ahead and compared the data on the Pocket PC and on the desktop. As I knew it would, it recognized that there was different data on the Pocket PC vs. the desktop. It gave me the deadly prompt: "Combine, replace, or remove?"
One would think that "Combine" would be the good thing to do, but as anyone who has done that several times will tell you, you'll end up with massive duplication of your data - and there's also a mysterious birthday shifting bug that will sometimes move all your birthdays off by one day. I've seen this happen time and time again. The screen shot above shows "Favorites, Files" because I had to sync my iPAQ 3870 in order to get this screen shot - when I docked the Jornada, it prompted me for action on "Calendar, Tasks, Inbox, and Contacts" - no mention of Files or Favourites. Since I knew I had added no new contacts, appointments, email or tasks - only the two Excel files - I thought it was safe to chose "Replace" as the option. It would simply replace all PIM data, and sync the files from the Pocket PC to the desktop PC. Right? Wrong.
It purged all the new files from the My Documents folder on the Pocket PC, deleting the two Excel files I had created. There's no trace of the data - I checked in this folder, which keeps copies of deleted synchronized data:
C:\Documents and Settings\ Jason Dunn \ Application Data\ Microsoft\ ActiveSync\ Profiles\ LittleShogun\ Synchronized Files Backup
But I discovered it only keeps track of documents on the PC, not on the Pocket PC. So, incredibly, I've lost both those Excel files and can't get them back. Why did ActiveSync delete files when I only told it to replace PIM data? Why doesn't it prompt the user when it's about to destroy data? I'm really kicking myself because I was going to make a copy of the My Documents folder on the Pocket PC just in case, but I thought "Nah, I know what I'm doing" - famous last words. Have you ever lost data due to ActiveSync? How did it happen? Vote in the poll!
