Thursday, September 04, 2008

Sync with MobileMe - how to control the direction of the initial sync

The MobileMe help file was useless, but this Apple forum post has the answer. In this case the configuration will overwrite iCal with MobileMe data, but you can invert the direction at step 6.
Apple - Support - Discussions - Help overwriting iCal with Cloud ...

1) Open MobileMe Preferences, and click on the 'Sync' tab.
2) Ensure that 'Synchronise with MobileMe' to 'Manual'
3) Click on 'Advanced...'
4) Click on 'Reset Sync Data...'
5) A window will appear, saying 'Replace: {All Sync Info}'. Use the list to change this to:
Replace: {Calendars}
6) Make sure that the animated arrow is flowing from the cloud to the mac. You can change its direction by clicking on the arrows underneath the image.
7) Click on replace.
I did this with the 10.4 .Mac preferences (after update, the name doesn't change) and it worked there.

It's not obvious how to do this for only one of the many sync options you have. I think if you switch to manual sync, then uncheck all but the item you want to sync uni-directionally, you can leave the other sync items untouched.

2 comments:

  1. I tried exactly this procedure and I get an error that the data cannot be synced because of inconsistent data. It directs me to repeat this procedure and i'm in a loop that doesn't work. Do you know of any way to just overwrite iCal with mobile me?

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  2. Thank you so much! Just googled this exact question, found your blog and fixed the problem.

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