.KEYWORD hotsync
.FLYINGHEAD HOTSYNC TUTORIAL
.TITLE HotSync tips and tricks
.OTHER
.SUMMARY All Palm device users are pretty darn familiar with the HotSync capability of their devices. But if you want to do a HotSync at home and at work, or share a computer among two Palm device users, things get just a little trickier. In this helpful tutorial, Fredlet takes you through making it happen.
.AUTHOR S. Fred Green a.k.a. Fredlet
Here’s what my day is like: Go to work: play with my computer. Go back home: play with my computer (yell at the cat to get off of the keyboard). Sound familiar?
I’m sure at least a few of you have some stuff to do in between, but I also know that more than a few of you have two computers on which you perform HotSync operations with your Palm devices. I tend to constantly copy and paste stuff into my Palm Desktop from emails and websites, and of course I can type much faster than I can use Graffiti. During the course of a normal day, I end up entering a lot of information into my Palm organizer using Graffiti as well, since I take it with me to business meetings, and elsewhere. It’s a part of my natural workflow to use my Palm device/computer duo in tandem this way.
.H1 HotSync at the office
Performing HotSync operations between two computers using the same Palm device without duplicating records isn’t actually too difficult. For simplicity’s sake I’ll refer to the two computers as ‘Home’ and ‘Office’. First, you’ll need to have two HotSync cradles, one for each computer with which you’ll be synchronizing your data. Next, you need to set up the Palm desktop software on both computers with the same user name.
Then, you need to HotSync with the Palm Desktops on each computer. My office machine gets a bigger workout, so I’ll start with that one. At the end of the day, I perform a HotSync operation in order to synchronize any work I’ve done on my Palm desktop and any additions I’ve made to my Palm device. Now I have the same data on my Palm device as I do in the office Palm Desktop.
.H1 HotSync at home
When I get home I have to do one of two things to keep my Palm Desktops from getting all flummoxed. The best of the two is to be sure I perform a HotSync before I change anything (and I do mean anything) in the Palm Desktop at home. This option allows me to have any changes made to my office Palm Desktop and Palm device added to my home setup before I start working. When you HotSync, the conduit keeps track of changes made to your information and moves the newer information from the Palm device to the Palm Desktop application and vice versa.
3Com recommends an option that is more of a fix-it measure to make sure you haven’t changed the same information on both the Palm device and the home Palm Desktop. To see their guidelines on this subject, visit http://www.palm.com/custsupp/helpnotes/hotsync/duplicat.html.
Had I made changes to the home desktop before synchronizing my data and these changes happened to coincide with changes made on my Palm device, the conduit duplicates the record.
It’s as if the conduit said to itself, "Self, why did Fredlet do that? I think she’s insane so I’ll just duplicate this record. That way if she ever emerges from this temporary insanity, she won’t have lost any information."
You get the gist of it. To avoid this impugning of my sanity, (not to mention that it’s annoying to have duplicate records in my device) all I (and you’d) have to do is go into the HotSync setup and choose "PalmPilot overwrites desktop" for each of the categories, as shown in Figure A.
.FIGPAIR A In the HotSync Custom settings, choose "PalmPilot Overwrites Desktop" for the Datebook, Address, To Do and Memo categories.
.H1 Two Palm devices, one Palm Desktop
Another scenario is performing HotSync operations with two or more Palm devices on one computer. Performing HotSync operations with different user names is a breeze. After I have performed a HotSync operation with my Palm device and Joe Bob (the Joe Bob Briggs obsession continues) is ready to do his, the conduit will look at the user name and recognize that ‘Joe Bob’ is in fact NOT the same as ‘fredlet’ and switch users on the Palm desktop. I really recommend this option if you have two Palm geeks in the household both performing HotSync operations on the same computer.
.H1 Co-dependent Palm devices
I have yet to come up with a solution for what I refer to as "the co-dependant Palm devices." It involves having a couple with two Palm devices and one database. This situation often also applies to the boss and the secretary who want to keep their schedules in sync.
These folks want to be able to HotSync all their records together, so they have matching data for both people. Every time I’ve tried to make this work using only the desktop software, it took about 20 steps and, in the end, usually duplicated some records or, even worse, precluded either person making ANY changes on either Palm device during the day. That would definitely be unacceptable to me since I can’t imagine using the Palm computer as a read-only device.
There are other options if you really want to go the shared-database route. Using the PalmIII’s IR capability almost gets round this issue where you can beam an address category to another PalmPilot with IR as well. The drawback here is that you’d pretty much have to delete a given category before receiving the data so that you wouldn’t duplicate records.
I’ll be exploring this issue more in the future and reporting if I find a better solution.
.PAGE
.H1 Conclusion
Keeping track of your information at home and office is relatively easy just by making sure you HotSync before doing anything else. Even if you forget, you can recover fairly quickly. Anyone with basic Palm device skills can master this set of steps. Using the Fredlet scale, I’d say the difficulty level is about two chihuahuas out of five, strictly due to the fact that you have to HotSync before you can change data on your home machine.
.BEGIN_SIDEBAR
.H1 Product availability and resources
Read Palm Computing’s guidelines on performing HotSync operations on more than one machine at http://www.palm.com/custsupp/helpnotes/hotsync/duplicat.html.
.END_SIDEBAR
.BIO
.DISCUSS http://powerboards.zatz.com/cgi-bin/webx?13@@.ee6ce02
