More Mobile Data Woes

You remember this post, right? Here’s an update.

When last we visited our feckless hero, he had somehow managed to move all his data from a Palm platform to the hated MS Outlook, at which point he magically was able to push it all onto his spanking new Windows Mobile device, the Palm Treo Pro…. whereupon he chose to enter the second decade of the 21st century by opting to sync with the Cloud, the Google cloud, to be precise.

Things were going okay for a few days until I made a horrific discovery. (Yes, I’m switching back to first person. Try to keep up.) It seems that everytime I modified a contact under Google contacts, silly Google, rather than deleting the pre-mod version and replacing it with the post-mod version, would either merge the two entries, keep both, or keep both with seemingly randomly merged data.

It gets better. Syncing with the mobile phone has become unpredictable, as memory errors keep accumulating.

Well, I figured, time to move away from Google, right? So I wisely exported all my Contact data into two separate formats –CSV and VCF– just in case. Then, on the advice on a knowledgable friend, I got myself a premium account with memotoo.com and did all the right thingies to move my contacts data from Gmail over to memotoo.

Well what do you think happened? The sync was complete and…. the memotoo version is lacking all the profile photos…. and both versions (Google and memotoo) are missing about 200 contacts. They’ve vanished.

Well, then, time to delete all my Gmail contacts and reload them from my wisely saved backups, right? Um…. it seems that when Google exports an address book –regardless of the format you choose– the profile photos do not export with it. So, I have lost all my profile photos.

Or have I? The data on my actual device remains pristine, right? I mean, minus whatever minor changes I recently made at the server end. All I need to do now is to successfully perform a device sync and all should be fine… until the next crisis.

But of course now the device won’t sync. Why? Who knows. All I know is that, even though Google Still Owns My Ass, I’m no longer impressed by the owner’s ability to maintain said ass.