Re: [Evolution] Hotsyncing with 1.4.4 -- hangs up on 40th to 45th contact "card"

[john <mail freelock com>]

Peter N. Spotts wrote:

> Folks,
>
> Just installed Evolution 1.4.4 (RedHat 8.0, USB hotsync) and when hotsyncing my addresses, the process stops at the 40th to 45th entry and waits there until the hotsync times out on my Palm Pilot. I tried removing the 46th record, and that allowed me to push to 60 entires. But I've got more than 300 contacts and don't relish the idea of halting, clearing a contact, then starting from scratch to get the entire batch on Evolution. 
>  
Last week I upgraded to Evolution 1.4.3 on Mandrake 9.1, with a serial 
hotsync, and got almost exactly the same result. Fortunately, right 
before doing the upgrade I had backed up the Evolution databases. The 
sync process had created duplicate records up to the point it quit.

I extracted my backed up address book, restarted Evolution, and did a 
one way sync from Evolution to Palm, and that finally worked (for the 
Addressbook). Since then I've disabled the addressbook conduit--it seems 
extremely broken right now.

The calendar conduit (when the synching finally got that far) duplicated 
every calendar entry. Running pilot-dedupe got rid of the extra copy. 
The task list seemed to sync fine--but in the end, all non-Palm data 
(categories, start date on the tasks) got trashed.

So I'm now extremely cautious doing syncs, backing up the Palm to JPilot 
(which is working flawlessly) and Evolution by running --force-shutdown 
and zipping up the local files.


I searched up and down for these problems, and I found a thread on the 
gnome-pilot list indicating there are some serious problems they can't 
quite seem to isolate in the software right now. Hope they can get to 
the bottom of it soon--I'm sure they could use some help.

> Then I tried syncing everything but the address book (disabled it), and all sanc (the past tense of sync?), 
> if somewhat slowly.
I use KDE, and often when I'm syncing, I'll kill the gpilotd instance 
that Evolution starts and run it from the command line to see the 
entries. The first sync with the addressbook created all the duplicate 
records. In the Task list, it duplicated all the records, then deleted 
the originals. That explains the time...

It didn't happen the next time I synced, though--seems like there's a 
problem when you upgrade Evoluton--both times I've done it it's tossed 
any data not storable in a Palm record...

> But when the process ended, I got error messages saying the AddressBook, Task, and Calendar backends had 
> crashed and that I needed to restart Evolution.
>  
Yes, when they've crashed for me I've had to kill -9 them.

> So I wonder if I am facing a slew of corrupted databases on the Palm Pilot or what? (Any repair software 
> available?) I seem to be able to sync with Jpilot flawlessly.
>  
So use that to restore your databases--though that will probably restore 
the original state that causes the problems. In my tinkerings, I had to 
get through a sync successfully before it started working normally. It 
seems that the upgrade procedure breaks the  association between each 
record on the Palm and its corresponding record in Evolution. So it then 
duplicates everything--and if it gets through this task completely, it 
then goes back through and deletes the Evolution copy. Then it all seems 
to work...

> Any suggestions, other than which cliff to leap from, would be greatly appreciated.
>  
Good luck...  check to see if you have a backup in ~/MyPilot, or in 
JPilot, and go from there if you don't have an Evolution backup... and 
try doing a copy from device to Evo or vice versa instead of a sync the 
first time (using whichever direction has your most recent updates)

Cheers,
John Locke
http://www.freelock.com