Come on Oggsync, give us some more information, please!

[Ben]

Hi
Just bought Oggsync.
Thanks for a good product.
Calendar sync works fine between google and my WM6 phone.

But contacts sync is impossible to get right.
I left the contacts sync process running, and after 56 hours, it
finally claimed to have completed the sync.

But: some contacts in google had not been copied to my phone.
And I have no idea how it was handling the duplicates.

Oggsync Support - you need to tell us a lot more about your syncing
process, so we can become intelligent users.

Answers to the following questions would be a help:

1. What order does oggsync go through my contacts in? It seemed to go
from A-Z more than twice. I guess the first time it was going through
each contact on my phone and looking for it on google. The second time
it was going through the google contacts and looking for them on my
phone. But why a third time?
2. What is the effect of a 1-way sync? Does it simply add the source
contacts to the destination, or does it wipe the destination and
replace with the source contacts. I cant see this documented anywhere.
3. How does oggsync handle a contact which has been changed on the
source and destination? How does it decide what to merge?
4. When a contact is missing, how does oggsync decide whether to
delete it on both devices (a recently-deleted contact) or to create it
on both devices? It would need a lot of information about the
creation and modification date of each entry to get this right. What
does it actually do?

Come on Oggsync, dont undersell yourself. You have sophisticated
users out here, who know, like you do, that contacts sync is a very
complex business. You need to give us a lot more information to go
on, before we can become confident users of your software.

Ben Cashdan

[OggSync Support]

Answers below.

On Sun, Aug 3, 2008 at 8:42 AM, Ben <bcas...@gmail.com> wrote:

Hi
Just bought Oggsync.
Thanks for a good product.
Calendar sync works fine between google and my WM6 phone.

But contacts sync is impossible to get right.
I left the contacts sync process running, and after 56 hours, it
finally claimed to have completed the sync.

But: some contacts in google had not been copied to my phone.
And I have no idea how it was handling the duplicates.

Oggsync Support - you need to tell us a lot more about your syncing
process, so we can become intelligent users.

Answers to the following questions would be a help:

1. What order does oggsync go through my contacts in?  It seemed to go
from A-Z more than twice. I guess the first time it was going through
each contact on my phone and looking for it on google. The second time
it was going through the google contacts and looking for them on my
phone.  But why a third time?

OggSync goes through them as they are in the database.  They are not sorted, so there is no telling which one will appear first.
 

2. What is the effect of a 1-way sync?  Does it simply add the source
contacts to the destination, or does it wipe the destination and
replace with the source contacts. I cant see this documented anywhere.

One way sync will just bring across events from the original side to the target side.  Other contacts on the target side are unaffected, yes it is additive.  You can back out the sync by unchecking the calendar and syncing again.
 

3. How does oggsync handle a contact which has been changed on the
source and destination?  How does it decide what to merge?

Google side always wins.  This is important as the Google is the hub.  When merging contacts, everything is preserved in both contacts and placed into a single new contact.  This feature is defaulted to off.
 

4. When a contact is missing, how does oggsync decide whether to
delete it on both devices (a recently-deleted contact) or to create it
on both devices?  It would need a lot of information about the
creation and modification date of each entry to get this right.  What
does it actually do?

It only deletes the contact if it has been synced previously.  Once a contact is synced, if it is deleted on either side, OggSync knows to delete the other one.
 

[Ben]

OK thanks

But why does it run through all the contacts 3 or more times on a 2-
way sync?

Also, how does it know if a contact has already been synced - where is
this information kept?

What if I sync google & my mobile, then google and outlook. Does it
know not to delete an already-synced contact which may not appear in
outlook?

Finally - when do you expect to introduce incremental sync? 56 - 72
hours is a bit long to leave my phone hooked up to wifi to sync my
contacts regularly!

Thanks for all the feedback.

Ben