Time Machine and Entourage

Thanks to Entourage 2008, I finally got to try out Time Machine to do a restoration. Let me point out, first off, that I happen to like Entourage (and in fact, I’ve had a pretty favorable impression of Office 2008 in general). However, when I let it use iSync to handle my contacts, each one got duplicated. This problem can only occur (I think) if you tell Entourage to go to Preferences > Sync Services, and check “Synchronize contacts with Address Book and .Mac”, which is off by default.

Today I decided to give Leopard’s iChat a try. I’ve been an Adium user for a few years now and would recommend it to anyone who asked, but I thought it was time to give iChat another try. That’s how I noticed there was something weird with my address book: both iChat and Adium use the address book to map AIM and Jabber contacts with actual names (obviously, Adium can handle a lot more than that). Mostly iChat saw what Adium was seeing, but due to a few various reasons not worth mentioning right now, not all of them did. A quick look at my address book showed everything was duplicated.

Unfortunately for me, I can be quite stupid sometimes, and just started to delete half of the contacts. It didn’t occur to me to check that they were exact duplicates until I was well into it. As it turns out, they were not. For each contact that showed up twice, one had all the information I had spent a long time entering. The other had the name and email address only. Of course, I was rather indiscriminate as to which one I was deleting.

Time Machine in the Finder Address Book.app happens to be one of the applications in which Time Machine treats as a full fledged citizen. Finder is one, and iPhoto and Mail.app are a couple of others (and I'm sure there are more). That is, if you’re in one of those applications, it does the whole [APPLICATION OF YOUR CHOICE] windows going off into the distance.

Fixing the mess simply meant deleting my contacts, and telling Time Machine to restore all to right before I had flipped that switch in Entourage. As it turns out, Time Machine is of more use than just letting me fulfill my lifelong dream of computer juggling.

Technorati Tags: , , , ,

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Xcode 3 language specification changes

So much has changed in Leopard that I am not surprised I cannot find anything about this yet. Basically, the plugin interface for Xcode 3 has severely changed. In particular, over the past few days I have been trying to make a *.pblangspec file for the programming language used by my group for software verification purposes (who, it ought to be noted, I do not speak for on this website). It turns out, that’s not what I really wanted to do. I am still trying to figure out what all has changed, but here are a few key differences: The file format is totally different. This is somewhat superficially noted by the fact that the file’s extension should now be xclangspec as opposed to pblangspec . For instance, I am using Resolve.xclangspec . The file format is totally different. I’m mentioning it twice, mainly to point out that there are no guides out there for it yet. It seems to make sense, if you realize that Xcode is now doing a lot more than just keyword matching and using regular
Read more

iPhone and iPod Touch, 802.1X and LEAP

This is more a note for people who were wondering like myself: the current OS X that comes with the iPod Touch and iPhone cannot handle either 802.1X or LEAP (before anyone tells me it handles 802.11x just fine, please remember that 802.1X and LEAP are specific forms of encrypting a wireless connection, not types of wireless connections. 802.1 1 x is instead a generic term used for the varying speeds of wireless, i.e. 802.11a, 802.11b, 802.11g, 802.11n, ….) This is really too bad, as both are have been built in to Mac OS X since at least version 10.3, and also both are the main ways I can get wireless at OSU . I have every intent on finding out if this gets fixed with subsequent OS updates. Incidentally, a big reason I am posting this is due to some Apple Store employees erroneously telling me it should work on the iPhone and iPod Touch, since it is built in to Mac OS X, which shares a lot of common code with the OS X on both devices (as far as anyone seems to know). I don’t fault th
Read more

Redux on iPhone and iPod Touch, 802.1X and LEAP

Strangely, this from October seems to be getting a lot (well, for me) traffic lately. That’s not really interesting enough to post about, but it seemed that it did make the following note more… well, noteworthy. While I don’t have either an iPhone or an iPod Touch, I do at least know someone who has an iPod Touch and could check this for me. So: It still doesn’t work in version 1.1.3. Although I haven’t seen anything about the iPhone, I would be heavily surprised if it weren’t the same deal there. Technorati Tags: iPhone , iPod
Read more