[IgorM]

I want to start by thanking everyone in advance for taking their time to help me with this problem and my apologies for the lengthy post.

I have a huge problem keeping my contacts and calendar in order with my BB 8830 World Edition while trying to sync it with 2007 Outlook on Vista OS, the data is irrelevant as it does it with both contacts and calendar events. I don't need to nor use email syncing, but the rest of the data is very crucial to me having over 1000 contacts it's becoming impossible to figure out what's being updated/deleted/added and at this point I am very skeptical of all my data being in order. Simply clicking sync and hoping that everything is fine, just doesn't do it for me.

First of all I am yet to understand the logic algorithm that the synchronization uses. For Example: If any item is deleted manually on the blackberry does it delete it from the outlook during the synchronization or does it restore it back to the blackberry from the outlook. The reason I am asking this is because I often make changes in both outlook and on my BB. So when the synchronization occurs which way does the data transfer? Because by logic whatever is missing on either side of the syncing would be added to another or the other way around would be deleted??? Is it possible to make changes to both Outlook data and BB data and have it merged/updated during the sync, does it have to be done in steps from one to other and then reverse? For Example updating a contact name field for a previously entered Company information and have that field updated on the device missing that information (I don't care if it trasfers the whole data as long as fields are updated). The following have been my experiences with synchronization which brought upon all these uncertainties and questions none of which I was able to get an answer to anywhere on this forum or many others:

1. My contacts information was duplicated during the sync creating duplicate and in some cases multiple entries for the same information (this is where my doubts started). It wasn't done for every single entry so tracking down extra copies in a 1000 item list is pretty hard.

2. After reading many threads and help topics regarding sync, I've tried playing around with the sync options. Changing the reconciling options to Adding, Prompting, Device win or Outlook win, seem to yield the same result. After Synchronization is complete the prompt message pops up with an arbitrary number(100) of items to be deleted/added to the BB device and another number(140) of items to be deleted/added for the Outlook. Why? Furthermore some of the items are the same on BB and Outlook and scheduled for deletion. I checked the entry to make sure there wasn't a duplicate being deleted, but there was only one entry in both BB & Outlook. What type of synchronization is it trying to perform? Once again I am yet to understand the logic this thing is following. Afraid of losing the data I haven't confirmed deletions/additions.

Perhaps I am missing a few things here that need clarification or maybe whatever I am trying to accomplish is impossible. I just don't understand how with all that technology put into BB a simple task of updating can't be performed. If there was a master Config file that would time stamp changes applied to individual data items, the sync should be seamingless as it would update it as per the latest change for that data item whether it be an edit/update or a complete deletion.

Can the data be changed on either or both BB and Outlook and updated properly during the synchronization on the appropriate devices? If so please tell me what the steps are, so the synchronization does exactly what I want it to do.

Thank you for your time.