Think before you sync

Last week I decided to bring my E71 away for a warranty repair. It has dust under the screen and hence some maintenance would do well. However before bringing it away it would be nice to have an other mobile device operational. My old Palm Windows Mobile device was still still somewhere in a drawer and I decided to hook it up to Lotus Traveler to load it with my calendar & contacts data. The load went well, the data was on there within no time. Then I noticed something peculiar on the next replication in Lotus Notes, suddenly a large amount of changes were coming in. At first I did not pay notice to it, until eProductivity notified me of the fact that a couple of tasks had data missing. The notice included the mention that missing data could be caused by synchronizing with a mobile device. How friendly the notice was, it scared me, especially since next I noticed that also a couple of my projects seem to have disappeared.

I quickly stopped the Lotus Traveler sync on my Palm Windows Mobile device and started to investigate a little more. Somewhere in the process things had gone wrong, one of the devices was not treating the data nice. All tasks that were synchronized to the Palm and back had suddenly also a changed priority, from no priority to a low priority. Now in the good habit of GTD and working the tasks per context instead of 1 2 3 priority this did not really bother me, but it was another sign of something seriously being wrong here. I decided to ditch the Palm completely and did a hard reset to destroy all data on it, after all I would not want this to happen again. Lucky enough I still had all data on my Nokia E71 that was still not out for maintenance. Synchronizing that data back was not really a feature of Lotus Traveler, but the Nokia did offer the option to print all tasks and so I did. This list now is my secondary list, that I will need to put against my primary list in eProductivity until I am sure they match again and no tasks are really lost, which will probably happen during the next weekly review. After all what is your trusted systems worth when it is not really your trusted system and you keep on pondering on what else would have been in there?

Shortly after this sync challenge I notified the kind folks at eProductivity about my adventure. Eric acknowledged that mobile synchronization is not always without challenges. With developing eProductivity they made sure that non of the standard fields on the todo form were changed to maintain compatibility with a.o. synchronization. Ian tried all he could to help get the data back, unfortunately I was too fast the night before with resetting my Palm and so all log data was gone and I had no real input anymore for him to help.

This little glitch in preparing for the Nokia E71 maintenance made that the E71 is still not out for maintenance and when it will be out, I will be using paper for the portable lists. After all I don’t want to go through an adventure like this again. Next time I will think before I sync!

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