Massive duplications or more

[Timothy Mathews]

New to Entourage, I set it up two or three days ago and didn't do anything
special in terms of the way it handles anything just selecting most of the
default settings for things like syncing. Things went fine for the first
couple of days and then yesterday, I got the notice that Mobile Me wanted to
change more than 25% of my Mac's calendar items and looking at the prompt
box, it showed over 1500 changes! Off the top of my head, I'd be astounded
if I have anywhere near 1500 current Calendar items and I'm sure I checked
somewhere that I don't want to sync items more than 3 months old making me
think if I complete that sync, I'm going to have a lot of items occurring
many times.

Is there a quirk I need to know about in syncing Entourage? Oh, the sync is
with my iMac, MacBook pro and iPhone and was working perfectly before I
instaled Enrourage as a part of Office 2008.

 

[Kerry]

New to Entourage, I set it up two or three days ago and didn't do anything
special in terms of the way it handles anything just selecting most of the
default settings for things like syncing. Things went fine for the first
couple of days and then yesterday, I got the notice that Mobile Me wanted to
change more than 25% of my Mac's calendar items and looking at the prompt
box, it showed over 1500 changes! Off the top of my head, I'd be astounded
if I have anywhere near 1500 current Calendar items and I'm sure I checked
somewhere that I don't want to sync items more than 3 months old making me
think if I complete that sync, I'm going to have a lot of items occurring
many times.

Is there a quirk I need to know about in syncing Entourage? Oh, the sync is
with my iMac, MacBook pro and iPhone and was working perfectly before I
instaled Enrourage as a part of Office 2008.

Yes sync into Entourage is a mess if you have more than one module
turned on at a time. you will get dups and other bizarre behavior.
only have one module turned on at a t time for sync. Switch modules
when you need to sync some else.

 

[Kerry]

New to Entourage, I set it up two or three days ago and didn't do anything
special in terms of the way it handles anything just selecting most of the
default settings for things like syncing. Things went fine for the first
couple of days and then yesterday, I got the notice that Mobile Me wanted to
change more than 25% of my Mac's calendar items and looking at the prompt
box, it showed over 1500 changes! Off the top of my head, I'd be astounded
if I have anywhere near 1500 current Calendar items and I'm sure I checked
somewhere that I don't want to sync items more than 3 months old making me
think if I complete that sync, I'm going to have a lot of items occurring
many times.

Is there a quirk I need to know about in syncing Entourage? Oh, the sync is
with my iMac, MacBook pro and iPhone and was working perfectly before I
instaled Enrourage as a part of Office 2008.

Yes sync into Entourage is a mess if you have more than one module
turned on at a time. you will get dups and other bizarre behavior.
only have one module turned on at a t time for sync. Switch modules
when you need to sync some else.

 

[Diane Ross]

I'm going to have a lot of items occurring
many times.

Download iCal Dupe deleter. Run it and it will clear up the duplicates then
sync clears them up in Entourage.

<http://www.nhoj.co.uk/icaldupedeleter/>

If you turn off Sync Services while doing this then tell Entourage to
overwrite with iCal then you loose all your categories. Leave Sync Services
turned on while running and categories wont¹ get deleted.

 

[Timothy Mathews]

Download iCal Dupe deleter. Run it and it will clear up the duplicates then
sync clears them up in Entourage.

<http://www.nhoj.co.uk/icaldupedeleter/>

If you turn off Sync Services while doing this then tell Entourage to
overwrite with iCal then you loose all your categories. Leave Sync Services
turned on while running and categories wont¹ get deleted.

One more question, if you don't mind. Seeing that HUGE number of dupes, I
stopped the sync so, right now, I don't have them on/in my system which now
leaves the question, would it be better to install the program you suggest
BEFORE I do the sync (I'm wondering if it fixes things on the fly during the
sync process) or should I just go ahead, do the sync and get all the
duplications and THEN install the dupe deleter program?

Thanks again for the help.

 

[Diane Ross]

One more question, if you don't mind. Seeing that HUGE number of dupes, I
stopped the sync so, right now, I don't have them on/in my system which now
leaves the question, would it be better to install the program you suggest
BEFORE I do the sync (I'm wondering if it fixes things on the fly during the
sync process) or should I just go ahead, do the sync and get all the
duplications and THEN install the dupe deleter program?

It all depends on whether you use categories. If you do all the cleanup in
iCal, then turn on syncing and select to overwrite Entourage with iCal, you
loose all your categories. You could try merge after cleaning up in iCal and
see if that helps, but I'm not entirely sure if the dupes in Entourage will
write back.

The best advice I can give you is to make a backup of your calendar events
in Entourage. You can always revert to your backup. To export calendar
events as .rge file and retain categories, you have to select export
category then only check calendar events. Depending on how many events you
have and how many categories this can be a chore. Another option would be to
make a backup in the Finder of our Identity. Just be sure to not use your
schedule to download mail while doing this.

 

[Timothy Mathews]

It all depends on whether you use categories. If you do all the cleanup in
iCal, then turn on syncing and select to overwrite Entourage with iCal, you
loose all your categories. You could try merge after cleaning up in iCal and
see if that helps, but I'm not entirely sure if the dupes in Entourage will
write back.

The best advice I can give you is to make a backup of your calendar events
in Entourage. You can always revert to your backup. To export calendar
events as .rge file and retain categories, you have to select export
category then only check calendar events. Depending on how many events you
have and how many categories this can be a chore. Another option would be to
make a backup in the Finder of our Identity. Just be sure to not use your
schedule to download mail while doing this.

Thanks so much for the tips...I'll experiment around a bit and see how it
goes.