I lost all of my contacts in my mac address book, entourage and on my BB. The only addresses that remain are the ones that I loaded onto phone. This happened while I was syncing while using pocketmac. Does anyone know how I can restore from either my BB or Powerbook.

Please help!

thank you.

Make sure you backup iCal, AddressBook, and Entourage before trying a PocketMac product. This suggestion appears in many Mac forums as users continue to lose data using PM.

Hi!

It's extremely rare, but we do hear of users losing all their addresses when syncing. From what we've been able to discover, it can happen when a couple of error conditions exist at the same time.

First, if you ever get a "Deletion Detected on Device" error message, especially on your first sync, you'd want to either cancel the sync and contact support for help, or choose RESTORE all to make sure you don't remove any records. The only way that error can happen is if you have synced with PocketMac before, and PocketMac finds old sync files to compare with. I've had more users choose "Remove All" quickly without realizing they truly haven't been deleting records on the handheld, and then accidentally delete the data.

Second, before synching, if you have chosen to have the BlackBerry write over the Macintosh data, and you have never synced before, your empty or nearly empty BlackBerry will wipe out the Mac's data right away. Ouch.

The best strategy is to set it up for 2-way syncing at first to make sure they are matched up before having the BlackBerry data over-write the Mac data.

Third, the Entourage database may not have been maintained beforehand, and the indexes can get really corrupted and export really bad sync files. Even empty sync files. That rebuild procedure on Entourage goes a long way to protect that database from its own tendency to corrupt data over time by fixing its indexes AND backing it up.

If you did happen to have rebuilt Entourage database in the past, our support team can help you restore the records from your backup file into your main database file.

Fourth, PocketMac makes a backup file in its working area. If you have not synced again after noticing your records were gone, the backup file may be in place and we can help you restore your data.

I'm sorry you happened to be one of the rare ones who lost data while syncing!

Please work directly with our support team so we can do whatever is possible to help you get your data back and diagnose what happened in your situation so we can prevent it from ever happening again.

Our support team works in the free web-based support area, here (sorry, I can't yet post URLs...)

pocketmac.net/support DOT htm

Thank you!