The Missing Sync for Blackberry finally hit version 1.0 today, and I immediately purchased it to replace PocketMac for Blackberry (quite possibly the worst sync product on the planet).

I backed up my Address Book and Calendar, and then fired up Missing Sync. In general, the Missing Sync for Blackberry syncs quickly and works much better than PocketSync for Mac.

I never was able to get PocketSync to do bi-directional sync properly and only ever used it to push information from my Mac to the Blackberry. Trust is a big part of sync, and you have to know that kicking off a sync won’t destroy data. PocketSync destroyed my data.

I hope Missing Sync proves to be trustworthy; it will be nice to be able to input information into my Blackberry and know that it will (likely) end up on my computers as well.

CONTACTS

In Missing Sync, Contacts sync doesn’t support Smart Groups as categories. I use Smart Groups to determine what I’d like to be synchronized to my portable device. This is unfortunate.

CALENDARS

I subscribe to various iCal calendars. During the first sync, Missing Sync duplicated those feeds as additional calendars with the same name. Upon resync, it complained that there are duplicate category names and failed. DUH. It also deleted ALL of my appointments on the Blackberry because I had set it to overwrite the device.

I deleted the duplicate calendars in iCal, but they still showed up in Missing Sync until I rebooted my machine. Deleting the dupes, rebooting, setting Missing Sync to overwrite the device, and re-syncing fixed this problem.

UPDATE, Sep 5, 2008 - Missing Sync will no longer sync my Calendar (after Leopard update and MobileMe upgrade). I am a computer expert, and I have not been able to make it work under any circumstances. See my comment dated Sep 5 (below) for more details on how I now sync my Blackberry’s calendar.

NOTES

Notes are a mess. I’m syncing with Mark/Space Notes (a bundled application), and there is no way to force one device to overwrite the other. It always tries to do a bi-directional sync, which can be a bad thing. In my case, I’m having some weird Apple Sync Services messages involving duplicated category names, and it’s very frustrating. I haven’t found a solution for this yet.

Mark/Space Notes categories — nice and neat

Missing Sync categories for Notes — all sorts of old categories that no longer exist

So the question is: how do I delete all the problematic categories that show up in Missing Sync? I assume these are associated with Apple Sync Services somehow, but the only option I see in iSync is to Reset Sync History, which is not what I want to do.

I tried creating new categories and moving all the old notes into them (hence, “Accounts 2″ instead of “Accounts”, etc.) but all this did was create even more categories. If I restrict sync to just the categories that I use, sync works without any error messages. If I tell it to sync everything, I get warning notices even though there aren’t any notes in the problematic categories.

UPDATE Notes sync appears to work now even when all categories are synced, but I have had to keep those stupid category names. I would love to re-use the original ones, but I have to figure out how to clean up the category list, first.

PHOTOS + MUSIC

After reading about corrupted iPhoto libraries in the forums, I am too scared to try this. By the way, A the forum traffic originating from the public beta was deleted today, so those posts are gone.

SUMMARY

Missing Sync seems to work. That’s all I have come to expect from Mac sync products. It’s 1000 times better than PocketMac, though, and that makes it worth every penny.

One note, however. I did successive syncs with verbose logging, and I noticed that changes were being made to records even when I wasn’t making any changes. Upon further inspection, the “changed” records showed no changes I could discern. This sort of thing makes me nervous.