Outlook -> Plaxo -> iCal woes

[macmaarten]

First off, here's my setup: MS Windows XP Pro with SP2 installed, MS Office 2003 (with, of course, Outlook 2003), Plaxo 3.2.3.43 plugin.

Apple Mac OS X 10.4.9, iCal 2.0.4, Plaxo for Mac 3.0 build 333.

Syncing the addressbook goes fine, although a bug (http://forum.plaxo.com/showthread.php?p=7619#post7619) which was fixed in Plaxo 2.0 has reappeared in this release. Syncing the iCal calendar however went awry.

Somehow, my original iCal calendars containing about 200+ items seemed to have synced fine to Plaxo and have made their way into Outlook as well. Syncing 3000+ items from Outlook to iCal caused problems.

iCal kept crashing. Deleting the calendars and reinstalling from a backup didn't help. Eventually, I manually downgraded from iCal 2.0.5 to 2.0.4, but to no avail. A good few hours research later, it turned out iCal choked on ~/Library/Application Support/SyncServices/Local/data.syncdb. Renaming that file of 14.2 MB made iCal usable again.

But it has stopped syncing with Plaxo as well. And I haven't been able to 'reset' the sync. Uninstalling/reinstalling didn't help, resetting sync point neither.

Two questions: is there a way to make the Mac start syncing with Plaxo all over again, and #2: is there a known issue with large calendars that iCal chokes?

Sincerely,
MacMaarten.

[dcolace]

First off, here's my setup: MS Windows XP Pro with SP2 installed, MS Office 2003 (with, of course, Outlook 2003), Plaxo 3.2.3.43 plugin.

Apple Mac OS X 10.4.9, iCal 2.0.4, Plaxo for Mac 3.0 build 333.

Syncing the addressbook goes fine, although a bug (http://forum.plaxo.com/showthread.php?p=7619#post7619) which was fixed in Plaxo 2.0 has reappeared in this release. Syncing the iCal calendar however went awry.

Somehow, my original iCal calendars containing about 200+ items seemed to have synced fine to Plaxo and have made their way into Outlook as well. Syncing 3000+ items from Outlook to iCal caused problems.

iCal kept crashing. Deleting the calendars and reinstalling from a backup didn't help. Eventually, I manually downgraded from iCal 2.0.5 to 2.0.4, but to no avail. A good few hours research later, it turned out iCal choked on ~/Library/Application Support/SyncServices/Local/data.syncdb. Renaming that file of 14.2 MB made iCal usable again.

But it has stopped syncing with Plaxo as well. And I haven't been able to 'reset' the sync. Uninstalling/reinstalling didn't help, resetting sync point neither.

Two questions: is there a way to make the Mac start syncing with Plaxo all over again, and #2: is there a known issue with large calendars that iCal chokes?

Sincerely,
MacMaarten.

If iCal becomes unresponsive, and it certainly can with large amounts of data you can reset it by doing a couple of things.

First, in the Plaxo system preference panel, select the Sync tab and then navigate to the Calendar sub-tab. Turn off Calendar sync.

Secondly, close all applications that might want to sync calendar data (iCal, Plaxo for Mac, Entourage, iSync, etc)

Next, navigate to your home directory (~) and into /Library/Application Support/ and move the iCal folder to the Desktop or Trash.

Log out of your Mac account to ensure that all applications that might have a connection to this bad iCal data are closed.

Log back in to your Mac account.

Open Apple's iSync application and open its preferences. Select "Reset Sync History..." (it may take a few seconds for this button to become active).

Go back into the Plaxo System Preference pane and reselect the Calendar sync option.

If all goes well, you'll have your iCal synchronized anew with Plaxo Online (and all your other sync points). This should take care of your #1 question. As for #2, no, there is known issue with this many sync items, but that said, I don't know what our upper limit of internal testing has been for iCal events. There may a limit in iCal that we're not aware of.

We will be releasing another important update to the Mac and Outlook sync clients within the next day, so I would hold off attempting to fix your setup (if possible) until you are able to download these updated versions. (They will likely be available this evening from Plaxo Online 3 Preview)

-Drew

[RickyB]

Will this update also be available via the included software update button in system preferences (for Mac)? Last time I updated manually I got all kinds of duplication errors with both my calendars and contacts.

[dcolace]

Will this update also be available via the included software update button in system preferences (for Mac)? Last time I updated manually I got all kinds of duplication errors with both my calendars and contacts.

For recent (last one or two) preview releases of Plaxo for Mac, the Plaxo Preference panel will download the latest version of the software for you allowing you to avoid having to navigate through the steps necessary to download the software manually from Plaxo Online 3 Preview. But this mechanism does not yet automatically patch your installed version; you'll still need to install the update manually.

Duplicates are something we're ever watchful for, especially during upgrades. I feel more confident that you won't have any duplicate problems with your iCal than Address Book. That said, I've been updating several machines here at the office with a couple hundred contacts in my address book without problems so I certainly hope it will go as smoothly for you.

Please let me know your experience after updating.

-Drew

[RickyB]

My Address Book was much more intact this time around. For some reason, one contact was duplicated 4 times (for a total of 5 identical copies). Not sure why this happened. I'll leave it there in case you want to take a look at it.

My calendars gave me the same problem as before when I updated. It appears that it has completely ignored the calendars that were already there (and syncing just fine) and created new calendars from my Plaxo data. So all of the calendars that I had before are duplicated (on iCal and Plaxo). When this happened last time I made a test event to see which version of the calendar was "linked" to Plaxo. It was the new one (I could tell which was new and which was old by the color of the calendar - the new ones were random colors, whereas I had manually colored the old ones to match my GCal and Plaxo colors). This time I just deleted the calendars in Plaxo online and iCal. It seems to be working again.

But then I realized that there were duplicates created of many events in most of my calendars. I can get rid of these by deleting them in iCal, but there is obviously still something wrong when Plaxo is updated. Would you like me to leave these duplicates in place so you can see them?

[RickyB]

Another bit of information: it appears that most of the problems stem from recurring events, specifically recurring events that have exceptions (i.e., one event in the series is deleted or altered in some way). These exceptions are not being honored. This does not account for all of the duplicates, however. I hope this helps.

[dcolace]

Ricky-

Thanks for the info regarding your Plaxo for Mac upgrade experience. Knowing how your address book and calendar responded to the update process was the useful info for us, so go ahead and remove the duplicate contact that popped up in your address book.

Regarding iCal event exceptions, this is something that we're continuing to work on but don't have a complete solution in place yet. We do support exceptions where one or more in a series of a recurring event is deleted but we do not yet support modified recurrences; they will quickly duplicate and make your calendar look messy if you have multiple sync points. We're working to support this in a future release.

-Drew

[RickyB]

Thanks. Support of this feature (modified recurrences) should be the last thing to make my calendars perfectly syncable (besides syncing events on GCal that are created by another user - word on the forum is that this is being rectified in a release very soon). Thanks for all your work! Could you post here when this feature is enabled?

[dgoldsc]

macmaarten, you're my hero! i've uninstalled Plaxo 3, reinstalled iCal, deleted /Library/Application Support/iCal as well as the calendars in iCal but iCal kept crashing.

My ~/Library/Application Support/SyncServices/Local/data.syncdb has almost 40MB and after I've moved that file to the desktop iCal is stable again.

dcolace: you may want to tell people about that data.syncdb file--it seems to be the only way to make iCal usable again.