I recently saw postings about the Missing Sync. It allows one to have more options when syncing to a palm device – in my case a Treo 700p. All of the features looked great: the ability to sync playlists in iTunes and iPhoto, the ability to sync all fields from the address book and a variety of backup options including backing up SD cards.

After installing the software I was impressed with how easy it was to set up these services. Then I started noticing the problems. All of my alarms were changed. Any item that had a reminder set for zero minutes before the event was changed to 15 minutes. If that wasn’t bad enough the alarms became sporadic – going off at times that had no relationship with the event. I then discovered I could not snooze an alarm. If I pushed the snooze button I never heard from the alarm again. Although Mark/Space’s website (the company that makes the program) stated it worked with Documents To Go, I could never get this to work. During each sync it would reinstall the program files, but never install my documents. After trying to fix these and about a dozen other problems (including not being able to send email), my Treo crashed – big time. I had to do a hard reset, which meant losing all of my data. I decided to uninstall the missing sync (it came with an uninstall application). To my surprise, after it uninstalled all of its files, it took my backup and install conduits with it! I located these files from a backup copy and replaced the palm hotsync folder. I now had all of my conduits and was ready to sync but after pushing the sync button I immediately got a hotsync error message. To make an already long story short, I had to reinstall all of the original software that came with my Treo.

I thought my nightmare was over – I was wrong. The Missing Sync had changed all of my meetings and events in iCal. Besides changing all of the alarm times (and adding additional alarms), it changed my birthdays of friends and family to end on dates this year instead of “never” which they were previously set for.

I am writing this to warn this to others: this software not only doesn’t work as advertised – it is dangerous! Unless you have six to eight hours of time you want to kill, stay away from the Missing Sync!

BTW I have been using Macs since 1986.