The joys of syncing

For over 4 years now, I’ve actively been doing development in the sync arena trying to get devices to talk together (I actually did some synchronization stuff in college so my history with sync goes back a bit). This is an area that is under appreciated and people seem to only say things when it doesn’t work. Syncing is hard; there are no right ways to sync, just wrong ways. No 2 devices or machines match up there data exactly, so choices have to be made to get things to sync. We do our best, but don’t always succeed. My recent experience with syncing has nothing to do with the software I write as I don’t use it; I don’t use it because I don’t like it, I don’t use it because I don’t use the devices we sync. 2 weeks ago, I bought a Motorola RAZR to replace my Samsung A900 with the idea that I could sync it, or at least sync the contacts. Without much difficulty, I was able to sync the contacts. The calendar was another story, it seemed to die depending on what I was syncing; I suspect it had to do with detached events or some kind of repeating events. So I gave up on the calendars, but was still pleased with the contacts. That was until last week when I started noticing that I was missing email addresses for people. It appears that one of my syncs eat secondary email addresses for people. I think I’ve rebuilt most of my contacts and it doesn’t appear to be happening more. While I was a little annoyed at the iSync team/Sync Services team initially, having worked on sync, I know how hard it is to prevent problems. Probably some minor bug that caused the first sync to nuke the entries. Oh well, at least it wasn’t the stuff I wrote that ate my data.