Dead Palm now live

The little power light finally extinguished totally, so it was time to charge the little bugger, give it a reset, and give it a try. My first attempt was a failure because I'd forgotten to plug in the USB connector to my Mac. Once that was straightened out, it synced right up!

I first synced to the empty palm, and it correctly picked up all my iCal stuff (which was really all I had). Then I put the SD memory card in and the fun began.

FileZ is a good program, and it's what I used to copy every last bit of Palmy goodness from the Palm to the SD card in the first place. Copying back was a little more difficult because FileZ would copy away happily until it ran into a file that already existed. At that point, it would stop mid-batch. I'd rather it gave me the option of clobbering the file or even if it skipped that file and did all the others. Either way would have been fine. As it was, I had to delete most of the files off the Palm before doing the copy, taking care not to copy any file that I did not delete. Also, some files would just recreate themselves after deletion.

Anyway, on the next sync, the laptop clobbered my hard-earned calendar and address data. After that, I recopied from the SD card just the DB files for things that had been whacked. The third sync was the charm.

I'm pretty happy with the results. One of my goals was to use the native Mac applications (iCal, Address Book) in sync with the Palm, but there are small issues with that. iCal's todo items are categorized the same way the calendar itself. This is not bad, but my Palm's todo categories don't match my iCal calendar categories. Also, the address book categories I had set up on my Palm didn't make it to Address Book at all. I may end up using the Palm Desktop software for the todo list and the address book, something I was hoping to avoid. It's not a big loss, though, since I have to use it for the Memo Pad anyway.

The bottom line is I'm still working out those little kinks, but I already have far more than I did before (under Linux). If this USB death problem crops up too frequently, I'll certainly look into replacing my m505.