Some time ago I wrote about a problem with my Treo 600 and jpilot. Doing a sync was causing the Treo 600 to reset and the sync wasn't completing either. So I was truly screwed. I pulled down the latest Palm Desktop and installed it on my Windows box as a measure of desperation. But it was acting bizarre as well. Being that I had just gotten the Treo 600 back from Palm Repair, I called 'em up and bitched about it being busted and that I wanted a new one. Their tech walked me through a variety of things to try to get things working properly. I was sure the damn thing was busted because it acted weirdly in an inconsistent way. That's how bad hardware generally manifests itself. But then he had me export the contact list out of Palm Desktop, move the Palm Desktop data file so the contact list was empty, and then re-import the contact list. After that, everything worked fine! Hmmm... So I first made sure that everything was stored correctly in Palm Desktop, then I went back to my Ubuntu Linux environment where God Intended us to be. I did a hard reset on the Treo 600 and wiped out all of the data on it. Before I go on any further with my story, I have to mention that I have a nightly cron job which tars off a copy of the .jpilot directory, so I always have a full backup every night going back a month. That way, no matter what stupid stuff I do, I can always get it back. Back to our story. So I tried something similar with jpilot as the Palm tech had done with me earlier with Palm Desktop. I exported everything in csv files, did a cat /dev/null > onto the Address and Datebook files, and then imported everything back from the csv files. Stuff came back into jpilot OK, though I did lose the address book categories, but that wasn't a show stopper. I then restored to the Treo 600, which seemed to go OK. I next added something to the calendar in jpilot and tried to do a sync. Oops... Bad scene... Once again it caused the Treo 600 to reset. Not good. And the Datebook also failed to sync. Bleah... So I replaced the .jpilot directory with a fresh copy of the data from backup. I did another hard reset of the Treo 600 and wiped the data. I next did a restore to the Treo 600, which seemed to go fine. Now here's the fun part... I next killed jpilot and blew away the .jpilot directory. I restarted jpilot, which created a new, empty .jpilot directory. I then did a sync with the Treo 600 and it repopulated jpilot with all of the data. Now everything works properly and the Treo 600 doesn't reset during a sync. Go figure. I'm guessing that something was corrupted in my jpilot database and was causing the sync to munge, but that it wasn't sent over in the restore process. I dunno. But I'm a happy guy again and felt it useful to share this strange tale with y'all. Russ
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