Problems with USB Palm sync

[Damian Wiest]

On Thu, Oct 19, 2006 at 09:25:19AM -0400, Jonathan Arnold wrote:

[snip]

> Thanks for all your help here!  When I first read this, I said to myself 
> that
> it wouldn't help, that I've tried all these various permutations.  Imagine 
> my
> surprise when it *did* work! I will post a complete followup on my blog, but
> I did have to load the 'uvisor' driver to get this process to work:
> 
> # kldload uvisor
> 
> Which I'm sure I played with before, but now it works.  Now I am just 
> struggling
> to get my Palm, which was recently hard-reset, back to where it was a few 
> months
> ago. I have the data on my hard drive, but I can't seem to figure out the 
> magical
> incantation to move it over to the Palm. It is in JPilot, but I haven't 
> quite
> gotten that to work smoothly.

Be extremely careful with this.  I was in the exact same situation and 
managed to wipe out my local Palm data doing a restore.  My phone 
(actually all of the Palm devices I've owned) tends to crash pretty 
frequently and require hard resets, which wipes out the username and all 
stored data.  In order for J-Pilot to sync with the device, it's going 
to want the usernames to match between the two.  Do _not_ use the 
File->Restore_Handheld command in J-Pilot to reset the username on the 
phone.  I had an older version of J-Pilot installed and when I did this 
(only selecting to restore Preferences) and watched as my local data was 
replaced, not merged, with the data from the phone.  Instead, use 
File->Install_User.

I'd recommend that you sync devices daily and also keep backups of the 
Palm files on your computer.  Also, keeping hardcopy backups is a good
idea.

> >I know I shouldn't be running the apps as root, but I haven't bothered
> >to configure /etc/devd.conf and /etc/devfs.rules on my laptop.
> 
> I've played with this a bit and it is a little weird.  Again, I hope to 
> have a full
> report on my blog some day real soon.
> 
> And thanks for your (and Anish's) help.  Learned a lot about run-time 
> devices!
> 
> -- 
> Jonathan Arnold     (mailto:jdarnold at buddydog.org)
> Daemon Dancing in the Dark, a FreeBSD weblog:
>     http://freebsd.amazingdev.com/blog/
> 
> UNIX is user-friendly. It's just a bit picky about who its friends are.

I'm glad I could be of assistance.

-Damian