[Opensync-users] One-way sync (WAS: Advice on a cell phone purchase?)

[Graham C. <g+o...@co...>]

On Tuesday 03 June 2008 07:11:13 Dotan Cohen wrote:
> 2008/6/3 Emanoil Kotsev <del...@ya...>:
> > Syncing is (should be) bi-directional, the one way is copy ;-)
>
> That is true. I have had lots of bad experience with:
> 1) Two-way data transfer between unlike database sources.
> 2) Telephones' limited data-entry methods.
>
> So, I prefer to enter data on the desktop and then push it to the
> phone as well. The phone can then mangle it all it wants, the real
> data is safe in KDE-PIM. When I am without the phone and I must add a
> phone number I prepend the name with a dot, so that I know to update
> KDE-PIM when I get home.

I also tend to use one-way sync to my phone.  In my case it is complicated 
further because I keep the master data on my (employer-provided) laptop in 
Outlook (and, hence, Exchange) and I only have one-way sync from Exchange 
into the Opensync environment (from which I propagate the data to kdepim, to 
my Nokia Internet Tablet and to my phone).

But even once in the Opensync environment, I only do one-way sync to my phone, 
because of the problem that the phone only stores a subset of the data.  The 
way I do that (with Opensync 0.2x) is to first sync the phone with an empty 
file-sync directory, then copy in the data files from Outlook and re-sync.  
This means that changes to existing entries on the phone are lost (new 
entries created on the phone are propagated into the Opensync environment -- 
I do have an option which deletes all the files before copying in the data 
for use when I want to clean all the data from the phone).

With Opensync 0.3x I am hoping I won't need to do that any more because 
Opensync will know that the phone only stores a subset of data and won't get 
confused when it is read back.  However, it would still be useful to be able 
to specify one-way (with and without a "remove all the existing data first" 
option).

Then all I will need to do is to make my Exchange sync two-way for a fully 
integrated environment!

Graham