Google Sync For Mobile Works, “Sync” Fails

I used to be very happy with Google Sync. It worked great and got my outlook calendar to my google calendar reliably and easily. And with google’s gears-based offline calendar, my calendar life seemed complete.
Until… it just didn’t sync. Not at all. I was always disappointed it would only sync to my default calendar, but not syncing at all, well that just sucks.

So I tried Sync for my blackberry. It worked perfectly (so far) and lets me choose which calendar to send my data to, which is perfect for keeping work and personal calendars separate and allows me do bidirectional sync without populating my work calendar with embarrassing personal events.

The only problem is that I tried to sync my contacts from Google Contacts. That was bad, mmmkay, because Google contacts SAID it would parse VCAL files, so I exported a vcal directory from Mulberry mail (and you know Cyrus got the format perfect to the letter) and google read every VCAL field as an entry, so I had 1200 people named BEGIN: VCAL, and 1200 people named END… etc.

Now Google, in their unfathomable wisdom, only lets you delete 500 entries at a time. Which means individually ticking the entries one at a time until there are less than 500 identical entries (like BEGIN: VCAL) which can then be bulk deleted. That was not happening. I tried, thus, to sync 8,000 plus entries to my blackberry and that did not work… that’s why there is the “fail” notice.

But somebody pointed out that you can switch to the “Older Version” and from that you can delete more than 500 entries a time and this bug was fixed in the newer version to prevent such deletions. From the older version you can search and delete larger groups (at least 1324 at a time).

You may need to log out of google and log back in to propagate the deletions to the New Version.