Friday, February 21, 2003
ActiveSync, Backups, and the 7th Plane of Hell
Posted by Jason Dunn in "THOUGHT" @ 03:00 PM
I wrote this two weeks ago when it happened, but I forgot to post it - I thought it was too rant-worthy to ignore, so I present to you "Reason #94 Why I Dislike ActiveSync":
******
Ok, this totally amazes me. My loathing for ActiveSync just got more passionate. I was toying around with Pocket Hackmaster, overclocking my device, and clocked it a little too far - I had to hard reset the device. 60 seconds prior to changing the clock speed, I had made a backup to SD using the Dell backup utility. After doing the hard reset, I restored from the backup. You'd think that everything would be fine, right? Here's what I effectively did if you want to reproduce this scenario:
1) Synced Pocket PC, everything is the same in Outlook and the device
2) Use Dell Axim backup app to back up to SD
3) Hard reset Pocket PC
4) Restore from backup
5) Sync with desktop PC
6) Watch all hell break loose
I'm sitting here staring at:
1) An empty Pocket PC synchronized document folder (it purged the files from the desktop, yet left them on the Pocket PC).
2) All my contacts stripped of categories - I have 861 contacts with "no
category" assigned to them.
3) The contacts app on the Pocket PC has no categories either.
4) Notes and Tasks seem ok, but the Calendar now has duplicated birthdays. Curiously, my actual appointments seem ok - no duplications.
I wasn't given the option of replacing what's on the Pocket PC, or combining the data - yet what occurred is clearly neither of those.
So the question becomes, how do you restore your Pocket PC from a backup without completely destroying your Outlook data? If I didn't have a PST backup that was only 10 hours old, I'd be absolutely furious. Something similar happened to me when I did a restore from another backup application.
Has this happened to anyone else? How could something like this have gotten past Dell? Anyone brave enough to reproduce? If I can get some data to support this being a common issue, I can pass this along to Dell and the ActiveSync team.
******
Ok, this totally amazes me. My loathing for ActiveSync just got more passionate. I was toying around with Pocket Hackmaster, overclocking my device, and clocked it a little too far - I had to hard reset the device. 60 seconds prior to changing the clock speed, I had made a backup to SD using the Dell backup utility. After doing the hard reset, I restored from the backup. You'd think that everything would be fine, right? Here's what I effectively did if you want to reproduce this scenario:
1) Synced Pocket PC, everything is the same in Outlook and the device
2) Use Dell Axim backup app to back up to SD
3) Hard reset Pocket PC
4) Restore from backup
5) Sync with desktop PC
6) Watch all hell break loose
I'm sitting here staring at:
1) An empty Pocket PC synchronized document folder (it purged the files from the desktop, yet left them on the Pocket PC).
2) All my contacts stripped of categories - I have 861 contacts with "no
category" assigned to them.
3) The contacts app on the Pocket PC has no categories either.
4) Notes and Tasks seem ok, but the Calendar now has duplicated birthdays. Curiously, my actual appointments seem ok - no duplications.
I wasn't given the option of replacing what's on the Pocket PC, or combining the data - yet what occurred is clearly neither of those.
So the question becomes, how do you restore your Pocket PC from a backup without completely destroying your Outlook data? If I didn't have a PST backup that was only 10 hours old, I'd be absolutely furious. Something similar happened to me when I did a restore from another backup application.
Has this happened to anyone else? How could something like this have gotten past Dell? Anyone brave enough to reproduce? If I can get some data to support this being a common issue, I can pass this along to Dell and the ActiveSync team.
