Birdie Sync duplicates

If BirdieSync 1.x constantly replaces your girlfriend's phone number with your mother's one, this forum is for you...
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migliris
Posts: 3
Joined: Sun Nov 25, 2007 4:37 pm

Birdie Sync duplicates

Post by migliris »

Hi there!

I've just found a bug in the Birdie Sync synchronization. For some reason I ignore, sometimes Windows stops recognizing my device as having already a partnership and asks me for a new one. Fine, it only happens once a month and I can deal with it. But BirdieSync duplicates some of the contacts (10% of my address book), and I end up with 100 contacts that I have to manually delete.

After screening some of them, I found that the duplicates are the contacts that have nicknames, and as these are on Thunderbird and not on the PDA, the nicked contacts on the PDA are considered new and are synced back to Thunderbird.

If anyone has a hint, I'd appreciate it, as it is really annoying (well, that I know what it is, I stopped deleting the duplicates...). If it could be one of the improvements in next versions, it'd be great.

Thanks,

Miguel

PS: I am running Windows Vista, Thunderbird 2.0.0.17, BirdieSync 1.6.10.1, and Windows Mobile 2003 (4.21.1088)

migliris
Posts: 3
Joined: Sun Nov 25, 2007 4:37 pm

Re: Birdie Sync duplicates

Post by migliris »

Hi, it's me again,

Actually, it gets worse than what I said. On the same situation as the one described before, the custom information that I had on Thunderbird (fields Custom1, Custom2...), and which was not present on the mobile, has been wiped out from Thunderbird. This is a very important issue for me, as I had stored there information that is crucial to me (like birthdays, ratings and tags)

Can will please let me know when this issue will be fixed (whether by realizing what the problem was, or by including nickname and custom fields in the PDA)?

Thank you,

Miguel

Birdy
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Posts: 3118
Joined: Tue Apr 18, 2006 11:43 am
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Re: Birdie Sync duplicates

Post by Birdy »

For some reason I ignore, sometimes Windows stops recognizing my device as having already a partnership and asks me for a new one
As far as I know, this problem is rather linked to ActiveSync than BirdieSync. It can happen that ActiveSync partnership tables need to be recreated.

Regarding the duplication of items with nicknames, it must be because your mobile device runs under Windows Mobile 2003 which doesn't support nicknames. So when comparing items coming from the mobile device with the desktop ones, the tool which removes duplicates find differences (the nicknames) and so don't remove the duplicates.

Normally, the tool which removes duplicates should give the priority to items that were manually created on the desktop. So it's weird that you lost your custom data. But if all the data were synchronized (and created) from the mobile device, then as the custom data are not stored on the mobile device, they will not be present in Thunderbird.

Since custom data are not synchronized by BirdieSync by now, it should be preferable not to use them at the moment. But I understand that it could be a problem for you. Note that it's possible to use an add-on if you want to access to additional fields in the address book (birthday, anniversary, category, spouse): MoreFunctionsForAddressBook.
It is also possible to automatically generate birthday events in Lightning with ThunderBirthDay.
Birdy

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