Synchronization from h***

I recently acquired a HTC Touch phone, with windows mobile. Lucky me, I thought. Now I can sync users and more across pc’s, Windows Live and my account on the exchange server. If only I can find the “avoid duplicates” setting on the sync -tool. I did, and initiated sync with Exchange.

So far, so good. Then I initiated sync with Windows Live… WooooHaa?!? What happened? Almost every contact got duplicated, and I could not tell which contact was from which source. Trying to delete one contact in one system sometimes removed a duplicate, and sometimes didn’t. I also ended up with some contacts in Exchange, not present in WL and vice versa. What a mess!

I ended up with deleting every contact, everywhere. Then fetching my Google contacts and importing them to exchange (It turned out WL contacts are not synchronized to exchange through the HTC, and they use different fields to identify weather a user is a duplicate or not).
Lesson learned:

1. Always have a good backup (I am glad I had mine in place. Recreating 200+ contacts is no small deal)
2. Be careful to initiate replication across platforms. Make sure you understand the limitations and restrictions of the software you use.