Information Technology

As I’ll get my Motorola Milestone on Monday (W00t! W00t!) I tried to get my data from my Symbian cell to Google somehow. I made several syncing attempts:

1. Using OpenSync on my Debian box
1. Syncing from Symbian to Gnome Evolution: That was my regular task to get contacts and calendar entries backed up to Evolution. I had to take care to never let the slow sync occur after an attempt was unsuccessful, e.g. when I forgot to turn on Bluetooth on the cell. This would have doubled all entries. I had to remove the lock file and rely on backups of ~/.opensync-0.22 and ~/.evolution quite a few times.
   I also had to take care to not sync too many entries at once. The process froze when the counter reached 140 items. I had to configure a size limit (of 500 bytes) to have the process jump over that limit (and ignore some entries).
   I tried to use this as starting point to get things into Google, as there’s a plugin for it.
2. Evolution to Google: For every item that should have been synced to Google, a Python error showed up, what took 2–3 seconds for each item. Syncing my >1000 entries thus lasted forever—and froze at a certain point, apparently due to Google’s limitation of connection attempts. A retry started to create duplicates. FAIL.
3. Symbian to Google: Just the same as above. FAIL.
4. Files to Google: I tried to be smart by first syncing my cell to plain files on the PC and then using subsets of those to sync them to Google incrementally. But the same thing as before happened, and at each step the entries from the previous step were duplicated. FAIL.
5. Building a recent SVN version from source: That was hard. I had to hack the code by myself to get it compiled. But then it FAILed at runtime.
2. Symbian’s Sync: There’s a help page at Google that explains how to sync (only) contacts from Symbian to Google using on-board software. That even worked! But the contacts got synced without their birth dates—this seems to be a Symbian limitation.
3. Mail for Exchange: Another help page at Google shows how contacts and calendar entries can be synced to Google using this free app by Nokia. But the name keeps up to its promise: It’s crap. When the “System error” comes up, there’s no way to get rid of it. FAIL.
4. GooSync: This proprietary app finally made my day. The Lite trial version only allowed to sync a time window of −7/+30 days. So I had to get a pricey premium account to enjoy a ±365 days window. This, however, still leaves older entries at my previous places. This setup seems to work so far for calendar entries, but contacts, however, don’t get updated to Google. And tasks can only be synced to GooSync.com, not to Google.

Sigh. Luckily, not much of my data should change within those few days remaining.