Macworld Forums: Sync data using MobileMe or Google - Macworld Forums

Post your comments for Sync data using MobileMe or Google here

Wow, a pretty comprehensive how-to on syncing a multi-Apple set up if there ever was one - consider this page duly bookmarked.

My humble set-up consists of no more than 2 iDevices so far, an iPhone 3G and a 3GS (waiting on a white 4), which I sync to my XP Media Centre Edition PC via iTunes.

MS Outlook is my primary Contacts and Calendars source, but in a cute twist I slave it to Google Calendar Sync, then Outlook takes over and slaves my 2 iPhones via MobileMe. My Google contacts are too random and motley, they don't reflect my real-life contacts and are excluded for that reason.

If I make any changes to my Calendar via either of my mobile phones, MobileMe takes over and slaves everything (except Google Calendar, which I will have to manually amend). However if I make changes to Google Calendar, which I can of course also do via either of my mobiles, everything stays in perfect sync.

Now then, just waiting for iPad version 2 to ship with multi-tasking, cameras, FaceTime and whatever "one more thing" turns out to be...

A very helpful, detailed review of the process here.

I am hesitating to make any changes: currently everything is as it should be, but I had a recent experience which left me slightly singed.

I signed up for the Mobile Me Calendar-beta and then discovered that many of my diary entries had multiplied, sometimes as many as 4 entries for each item. Not liking this, I deleted some of the multiples, only to get alarmed emails from previous invitees "You mean, we AREN'T going to Romeo and Juliet on Saturday after all?" etc.

After a while, I decided to revert to the non-beta original version and all the multiples which were left disappeared. However, I still don't know which events I had invited other people to had been cancelled, as I did not keep a note of which multiple entries I had cancelled.

Theoretically syncing Mobile Me is straightforward, but unless you have the correct combination of things checked (not always the most logical combination) entries can multiply. I had a similar problem a few months back after a little idle tinkering with settings. Many of my contacts multiplied, on this occasion sometimes as many as SIX times. A session on the Apple helpline proved efficacious, if a little costly.

While MobileMe is great in theory, in practice it isn't all roses. I spent a great deal of time with MobileMe tech support trying to figure out why one of my Macs just gives "your iDisk can't be synced at this time due to Error 14" messages. Then my other Macs started saying "iDisk not in sync" and giving up whenever I tried to sync them. I have seen files simply disappear from my iDisk for no apparent reason, and saves to the iDisk (especially Word documents, for some reason) often take forever (as I write this I'm trying to save an Address Book backup to my iDisk and the little gear has been spinning for at least 15 minutes).

They never did figure out what the problem was and ended up recommending that I turn off iDisk sync. They claim this issue is supposed to be fixed in the next OS update.

Also note that, last time I checked, the makers of 1Password recommend against trying to sync your password file with iDisk and suggest DropBox instead.

Maybe the big new data center that Apple is building will resolve some of the problems. One can always hope.

Oh, if only syncing with Google worked as straightforwardly as stated here, and didn't result in duplicated contacts, duplicated calendar entries, and a host of other headaches. I'm long past the "three strikes and you're out" rule on this one. As kenhare indicated, sessions on Apple forums and so on can prove invaluable, but in the end you have to ask yourself how much otherwise productive time you're willing to sacrifice in your effort to be more productive. And it all starts with frankly stupid architectural decisions, like not having separate firstname and lastname fields. All this experience has done for me is make me that much more skeptical of the fans of Google (including about their beloved Android).

If you want to sync to an iPad DO NOT UPGRADE to the "new" MobileMe Calendar - iPads can only sync using the "old" MobileMe Calendar.

kenhare, on 18 October 2010 - 07:57 AM, said:

How do you revert back to the old MobileMe calendar?

wiz302pa, on 18 October 2010 - 02:48 PM, said:

Excellent article! I know syncing Entourage with MobileMe is outside your intended scope, but it's worth mentioning that if you upgrade to the new WebDAV version of the MobileMe calendar, Entourage will no longer be able to sync its calendar with MobileMe. Entourage users who sync with MobileMe might not want to upgrade to the new WebDAV calendar. The new Outlook included with Office 2011 can't sync with MobileMe at all, at least not in the initial release. Let's hope Microsoft fixes that in an early update.

I've been a .Mac subscriber from the very beginning and I used to use iSync. No more. My experience was terrible. Constantly corrupting data...trying to sync, not doing it but still wiping data. It's been a really poorly managed system. You need to to totally trust the syncing and I just can't. I did enjoy your article though. I didn't even realize that some of those services were available from Google. Also, being a Firefox user (Safari kinda bites) I will look into it's bookmarks syncing...thanks

really good article but how to sync several google calendars with the iphone 4 IOS 4?
It's seems it doesn't work for the moment.

Fantastic article!! Really informative guide to a very important subject.

I'v been a MobileMe subscriber since the iTools day, and have to say, I'm a little disappointed with the value today. It's a high price to pay to keep things in sync, especially when iDisk integration works so badly compared to Dropbox (this should be a complete embarrassment to Apple).

I recently started syncing with both MobileMe and Google Apps. I'd heard bad things about Google sync, but so far everything is pretty smooth. There is a great new service called Rainmaker, that will pull in data from LinkedIn, Facebook and Twitter and merge it with your Google Contacts. This along with Google Voice pushed me over the edge to really give Google a shot.

Google's web apps are far superior to MobileMe in terms of speed and usability. The code is bloated on MobileMe, and loads really slowly, especially on anything less than a very high speed connection (and even then, not great). Google loads fast - this matters. I don't care how pretty the UI is, if it's slowing me down, I don't care how it looks.

One minor correction: Google does offer bookmark sync through Chrome. You can add your credentials in the preferences and it will sync your bookmarks between Chrome on different Macs. (Obviously this doesn't help with iOS devices though). In my experience however, the implementation is flawed. If you import everything from Safari, then Chrome has issues syncing if it's more than a few hundred bookmarks. These issues are well documented of Google user forums, and yet the company has not responded or taken any steps to resolve this issue. Not an encouraging sign for the support side of things.

This post has been edited by sterlingz: 21 October 2010 - 12:48 PM

My recollection was that there was a link on the Calendar Beta website, but sadly I don't remember... I put the whole experience as far out of my mind as I could and will happily stick with the old model meantime!

wiz302pa, on 18 October 2010 - 02:49 PM, said:

boumy, on 19 October 2010 - 03:22 PM, said:

You can sync more than one google calendar when you setup an Exchange account that points to the google calendars.

http://www.google.co...n&answer=138740

After you set it up, on your iphone visit m.google.com/sync and select the calendars you'd like to sync.

Hi,

I've been trying to set up address book sync with google contact for a long time now. I have tried the steps listed in this article before and I tried them again; but it simply does not seem to work for me. When I do a 'Sync Now', the Sync menu seems to rotate for a while, but nothing happens to the address book entries. No warnings, errors, either!

I was hoping that 10.6.5 (where, as per the release notes, one of the issues fixed had something to do with google sync!) will fix it for me. But apparently not!!

Any ideas, anyone?

thanks!