While on vacation last week I was messing around with all the syncing options I have. If you read one of my earlier entries about switching from Apple’s Mail to Microsoft Entourage you will recall that I use Exchange2003 at work, which syncs to Entourage on my PowerBook via the Outlook Web Access front end. From there Entourage uses Apple’s SyncServices to sync up with iCal in a new calendar it creates called Entourage. From iCal I can then sync wirelessly to my Motorola e815 cell phone via Bluetooth and my .Mac account. Whew! That should be some exhausted packets by the time they get to the phone.

Every once in a while my phone will stop syncing correctly and the only solution I have found is to tell iSync to reset the phone and overwrite everything on the phone during the next sync.

I was bored and thought I would try to figure out what was going on, so I thought I would wipe out everything from the phone to iCal, to Entourage and start all over from Exchange. So I reset the phone. Then I deleted the Entourage calendar in iCal. (You gotta hand it to the developers at Apple that wrote SyncServices; they are pretty fast!) Within a minute or so not only was the iCal Entourage calendar gone, but it had completely wiped out my Entourage calendar. Can you guess what happened next? Entourage did a sync with my corporate Exchange account and wiped out my entire Exchange calendar at work.

Now I was screwed. I should have made a backup before I started playing around but I didn’t and I got burned. Almost. I remembered that I had .Mac and decided to try a sync one last time with iSync telling it that .Mac should overwrite everything I had. It took a little while but my calendar items started showing up in iCal. From there they started showing up in Entourage. From there they started repopulating my Exchange2003 calendar at work. It took 15-20 minutes to get everything back, but I got it all back, including all the meeting attendees for meetings that I had scheduled.

I have written here before about how Apple needs to add more value to the .Mac service to make it worthwhile or I would probably not renew my subscription in October. This one simple thing just made .Mac pay for itself. Luck was on my side.