Many people use Apple’s iSync every day. I am not one of them. I thought it was pretty cool when it came out. Finally, I could sync all my personal data between my work and home Macs, Palm handheld, and iPod! For me, it just didn’t work as advertised, especially between the Palm and Mac. Some phone numbers and email addresses were duplicated, some disappeared! Even with my iPod, iSync was telling me changes were made on the iPod and would overwrite what was on my Mac! I followed every piece of advice I could find from Apple and other sources, but I just couldn’t tolerate data loss. It took me a couple days to get everything back in order. Most of my calendar was in triplicate. My contacts had tons of duplicate and missing phone numbers and email addresses. I had to reconfigure Palm Desktop to the way it was originally. It was a mess. I haven’t tried it again since.

Before iSync, I simply synced my Palm and iBook with Palm Desktop. Since I brought my work iBook home with me every day, I had no need for an up to date Address Book on my home iMac and I didn’t care if that stuff was on my iPod. That all changed when the iBook was replaced with a Power Mac G4. Now I needed my contacts at home. I had to figure out some simple steps to make sure I was able to do what iSync was not. After some research, I came up with what has been an excellent iSync substitute for me: the Finder, with a little help from Palm Desktop.

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