Friday, October 02, 2009

Palm to Google calendar migration: Dba2CSV

I received a comment on on of my many Palm to iPhone migration posts plugging a calendar migration tool:
... To move from Palm Desktop to gCal/iPhone etc you can also try Dba2Csv or Palm2Google to move your calendars. No sync here - this is just accurate conversion from .dba to .csv (for Palm Desktop 4 files) or direct export from Palm to Google Calendars (for Palm Desktop 6 files) ... Unlike some other solutions to this problem, I am an independent freelance developer, and I provide unlimited online help (chat/email) AND a 100% quibble-free money-back guarantee :-)
The author's web site advises ...
... The best method for Palm Desktop 4 users is usually to upgrade to Palm Desktop 6 & use the Palm2Google tool within Dba2Csv. This process should only take 5-10 minutes, if you read the instructions under "Palm2Google" in the main menu on the left first. Once Palm2Google has moved your data to Google you can easily sync Google Calendars with nearly any software or mobile device, or export as an iCal file to import to most calendar software ; once your data is where you need it, you can stop using Google Calendars altogether if you wish, use Google Calendars to keep syncing with your new device, or just keep the data there as an online backup...
With Emily and I sync our iPhone Calendar.apps with Google's Calendar using Google's Exchange server ActiveSync (Google Sync). It's worked very well for us and I'd vouch for it, though the semi-secret UI for multi-calendar support on the iPhone is obviously not for general consumption.

So how did we get to Google Calendar?

Emily had given up on Palm many years ago, but in my case I just gave up on my Palm calendar and started a new one. See a prior post with several options for Palm calendar migration.Now that Google has an Outlook Sync product that's an easy option for any Palm user with Outlook available.

If you're on Palm Desktop though, there may not be a lot of options. So this might be worth looking at.

Incidentally, this post inspired me to update my old Palm to iPhone migration table.

2 comments:

Neil Gerstenberg said...

Hi John, thanks for the mention on your blog - from the number of people using the software I wrote I would say that there is a massive desertion of Palm Desktop 6 in favour of other platforms, and I'm really not surprised: I have two installs on separate XP machines that now crash every time I edit events. As a Macbook user, moving to Outlook seems like "Out of the frying pan..." to me, but I suppose some people don't have the choice. Every Palm user I know who moves to Google Calendars (and I know a lot) are absolutely thrilled.

I'm confessing here too, in public, that I had to put the price up recently because of the large number of users having horrendous problems Palm Desktop 6.2, corrupt files etc, and hours of Palm support supposedly fixing things remotely. There are more and more people who now need a few hours of help (right now!) to get a clean and accurate copy of their 8 years worth of Palm data into Google Calendars... and 99% of people are happy to pay - as long as it actually works!

Cheers,
Neil

JGF said...

Great to learn that your project is paying off Neil. It's a noble effort to free people's data.