Syncing entourage calendar with iCal and Nokia phone for 2007

[mquarmby]

I have been syncing my Nokia phone and iCal for several months now and
all has been well. This morning I discovered that nothing beyond the
end of this week has been synced. ie nothing has been synced in 2007. I
have searched preferences (my phone, iCal, Entourage, iSync)
everywhere and I cannot find any option to limit syncing until the end
of 2006. Any ideas?

 

[Diane Ross]

I have been syncing my Nokia phone and iCal for several months now and
all has been well. This morning I discovered that nothing beyond the
end of this week has been synced. ie nothing has been synced in 2007. I
have searched preferences (my phone, iCal, Entourage, iSync)
everywhere and I cannot find any option to limit syncing until the end
of 2006. Any ideas?

Is the Entourage Database Daemon (Office Notifications) turned on? Spotlight
will index any cache files the Entourage daemon has created even if the
daemon is not launched, but no new cache files will be created until the
daemon is launched again. If the Microsoft Sync daemon never launches,
there's no way for Entourage to sync data with Sync Services. The
preferences in Entourage for Sync Services basically control 1) if this
daemon app is launched and 2) where it should sync data to-from.

More on SyncServices

<http://www.entourage.mvps.org/faq_topic/sync_services.html>

--
Diane Ross, Microsoft Mac MVP
Entourage Help Page
<http://www.entourage.mvps.org/>
The Entourage Blog lists the EHP as one of the top five Microsoft Entourage
resources.
<http://blogs.msdn.com/entourage/>

 

[mquarmby]

To my knowledge I have never turned this off and get reminders popping
up several times per day (two just then while typing this). I searched
through the Entourage help to see how to turn it on or off and found it
was already on, as I suspected. The menu item under "Entourage" shows
"turn off Office Notifications", meaning that it is currently switched
on. I don't know how long this problem has been active as it was only
this morning that I wanted to check something on my phone calendar
during January (which I had only synced yesterday) and found everything
in 2007 entirely blank. When I got home I checked iCal (my phone syncs
from iCal which syncs from Entourage) and iCal is blank for 2007 as
well.

I have just synced my iPod using iTunes and some things in 2007 have
appeared while others haven't. I reopened iCal and now there are some
events present in 2007 while others are missing. It seems that only
some categories of events have synced while others haven't.

 

[mquarmby]

I just remembered something which maybe related. During the week I
downloaded and installed the latest Office Update. Yesterday was the
first time I had synced anything since I had done this (I hope my
contacts are all OK as I haven't checked them!). Normally it takes
less than a minute to sync my phone calendar and contacts but yesterday
it took a great deal of time and I actually left the computer to do
something else while the syncing process continued. I wonder if there
was a problem with the latest update which has caused this?

 

[Kerry]

I just remembered something which maybe related. During the week I
downloaded and installed the latest Office Update. Yesterday was the
first time I had synced anything since I had done this (I hope my
contacts are all OK as I haven't checked them!). Normally it takes
less than a minute to sync my phone calendar and contacts but yesterday
it took a great deal of time and I actually left the computer to do
something else while the syncing process continued. I wonder if there
was a problem with the latest update which has caused this?

The Microsoft Daemon would be in your preferences your account login
items. See that it is starting.
Check you isync to make sure its got all to sync.

 

[Diane Ross]

I just remembered something which maybe related. During the week I
downloaded and installed the latest Office Update. Yesterday was the
first time I had synced anything since I had done this (I hope my
contacts are all OK as I haven't checked them!). Normally it takes
less than a minute to sync my phone calendar and contacts but yesterday
it took a great deal of time and I actually left the computer to do
something else while the syncing process continued. I wonder if there
was a problem with the latest update which has caused this?

I think yours if the first report of this problem since the update. That
doesn't mean that something didn't happen on your computer that caused the
problem. SyncServices still have some bugs and I know Apple is working on
improvements. Anytime when two different applications work in concert it's
hard to tell which application caused the problem. I do know that there
have been cases of complete data loss using SyncServices so backup is
crucial. The backup needs to be out of the sync loop.

--
Diane Ross, Microsoft Mac MVP
Entourage Help Page
<http://www.entourage.mvps.org/>
The Entourage Blog lists the EHP as one of the top five Microsoft Entourage
resources.
<http://blogs.msdn.com/entourage/>

 

[mquarmby]

I have checked my login items and it is listed there. I also did a
Force Quit where I brought up the window which shows all programs
running so that you can quit them, and it was listed there as running.
I can't find any preferences in iSync to specify what you want to sync
other than everything in the address book or iCal. I can't see any
categories listed anywhere that you can choose to sync some and not
others. In iSync there is an icon for my phone which I clicked on and
it gave the option of syncing "All" which it is set on, or selecting
various Entourage categories. All categories had been ticked in the
past but were greyed out because "All" had been selected.

I will be away from my computer for the next couple of days so unable
to read this usergroup until Wednsday night.

 

[mquarmby]

Dear Diane,

Thanks for your replies. You spoke too soon! I lost everything in my
calendar today - going back several years! Fortunately I had backed up
my computer a few days ago and all has been recitfified. For those
Googling I will detail everything I did step by step. Perhaps this
will be of some help to others.

On Christmas Eve I still couldn't get iCal to add any dates which I had
in Entourage for 2007. So, I thought I would use the iCal "import
Entourage calendar" function which took several minutes to complete.
This added all dates including those I had in 2007. So then I deleted
the synced Entourage calendar (in iCal) and renamed the newly imported
calendar as "Entourage". Then I tried syncing my phone and it worked!
I now had all the 2007 dates.

I shutdown my computer and went away for a few days for the Christmas
holiday break.

While I was away, I was using my Nokia N70 to check my diary and
discovered that where I had deleted a few repeating events for this
week, due to the Christmas holidays, all repeated events were repeating
weekly throughout the year and onwards and none of the odd dates here
and there which I had deleted in Entourage had been deleted on my
phone's calendar. While this was not such a problem as checking my
diary, it was obvious that on Christmas Day I wouldn't be working at my
regular job (a repeating calendar entry) it was frustrating that this
problem didn't appear before, and deleted occasional events which
normally repeated, didn't show up on my phone.

When I got back home this afternoon I thought I would check iCal to see
if it had the same problem and it did. I then opened my calendar in
Entourage and found EVERY event was listed twice - even the public
holidays and all day events. As the duplicated events were all given
the "none" category, I started deleting these one by one (as most were
repeating events this would not take too long). I had only been doing
this a couple of minutes when I noticed the real entries vanishing from
the screen and within a few seconds, several years of calendar entries
had completely vanished!

I tried to sync with iCal and all the events in the Entourage calendar
in iCal vanished. Then I tried to use my Nokia calendar to sync back to
Entourage (all categories would be lost) and my phone's calendar went
blank too.

Fortunately I do a complete backup of my computer each night, the last
time being Christmas Eve. I found the Main Identity file on my backup,
copied it, dragged it to the desktop, changed the file name of my
current Main Identity and named the copied file "Main Identity" and
dragged it to the correct folder.

I then opened Entourage and a message came up to rebuild the database
(a few other things appeared too but basically it all meant that the
new database had to be rebuilt). I did this, not worrying too much as I
had the original backup file still on my external drive should
something go wrong. This all took a long time. Finally I opened
Entourage to find my inbox containing 68 unread emails from October (I
have no idea what this is all about - I am sure I have already read
these) but checking my sent box, the emails I sent up to Christmas Eve
were all there. So I have just lost all the emails that came in today
from my two days away - fortunately I had read them on my phone but not
replied to them - that is the next problem, trying to remember their
senders and contents!

I checked my calendar and it is all perfectly intact again. I reopened
iCal and it updated all the dates from Entourage perfectly (as far as I
can tell) and then I opened iSync and synced my phone. It appears to be
perfectly synced as well. None of the deleted repeating events have
appeared this time.

I have no idea how or why any of this happened but at this stage it all
seems to have had a happy ending with everything back to normal - my
fingers are crossed!

Cheers,

Mark

 

[Diane Ross]

Thanks for sharing your story. I'll get it posted soon. (Am working on an
update for the web site and have new additions on hold).

One suggestion that would help in the lost email for the past few days. Set
your account to leave mail on server for xx days. This way you could go back
and get those lost messages.

--
Diane Ross, Microsoft Mac MVP
Entourage Help Page
<http://www.entourage.mvps.org/>
The Entourage Blog lists the EHP as one of the top five Microsoft Entourage
resources.