I did a dumb thing yesterday....but managed to recover nicely.  The university where I teach sent out an email letting everyone know that they are now able to accommodate handheld devices.  That is, they now have a way for those of us who use Pocket PCs to sync to the university's GroupWise mail, appointments, tasks, contacts, and notes.  The email provided a link where we could download the Intellisyn software directly to our Pocket PCs. 

About all that I have ever used my Groupwise account for has been for campus email.  I forward all the mail sent to that account to my personal POP3 email account, so I don't use GroupWise for appointments, tasks, contacts or notes.  But because I am always open to trying new things on my Pocket PC, I downloaded the software directly to my hw6925 and proceeded to install it. When the software was installed on the Pocket PC, I was prompted to perform my first sync.  The sync went very well and everything worked like a charm, but...............later, after I had synced the hw6925 to my computer, I discovered that syncing to the Groupwise account had wiped out all the appointments on my handheld, which in turn had wiped out all the appointments on my computer after I synced the hw6925 to my computer!  [big OOPS!]    And I had performed my little experiment without first backing up my hw6925. 

No problem, I thought.  I've got Outlook set up so nothing (appointments, tasks, contacts, email) is ever deleted until I manually purge Outlook's deleted items bin, so I can usually find things that I have erroneously deleted there.  But when I reviewed this bin I only found a small number of appointments.  It looked like I might have to reenter all these appointments into Outlook.

Then I remembered......I have three other Pocket PCs which I sync regularly to Outlook.  I wondered, "Could I sync this information back to Outlook?"  I was concerned that if I synced one of my other Pocket PCs to my computer, all my appointments would get deleted from the next Pocket PC.  So, here's what I did and it worked great!

I backed up my hx2415
I deleted the partnership between my desktop computer and my hx2415
I created a new partnership between the desktop computer and the hx2415.
After the partnership was created, I chose to only sync my appointments.
When ActiveSync synced the first time, ActiveSync recognized that there was data on both the desktop computer and the hx2415 and asked me how I wished to proceed.  I was given three options:  




I chose the first option to combine the items on the computer to those on my handheld.  When the first syncing was completed, I selected Contacts, Tasks and Notes to sync and when I was again prompted with the above screen, I chose to replace all the items on the Pocket PC with the items from the desktop computer.

One nice thing about ActiveSync 4.2 I discovered through all this was that ActiveSync recognizes when there are duplicate items on both the Pocket PC and desktop computer.  After ActiveSync combined my appointments, ActiveSync provided a screen of items that were duplicated and asked me how I wished to proceed.  I don't remember ever seeing this with ActiveSync 3.8.

Then, being a bit paranoid, I deleted the partnership between my hw6925 and my desktop computer and created a new partnership.  When I synced the two devices for the first time, I chose to sync all of the Outlook data and when prompted with the above screen, I chose to replace all the items on the hw6925 with the items from the desktop. 

The moral of the story
Things I learned from this little experiment:

Always backup my data before doing something I don't really understand
Don't do things I don't really understand
Having multiple Pocket PCs is a good thing.

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