All About Symbian - Symbian, Nokia and S60 unwrapped.
How can I avoid duplicate contacts when syncing to Ovi? Syncing is broken
Published by Steve Litchfield at 18:25 UTC, April 22nd 2009
Question:
Q. Through changing devices, I've ended up in the situation where my contacts are fine on my S60 phone and look fine on Ovi, but when I try syncing, I end up with either missing data (phone numbers) or duplicate entries. The syncing's well and truly broken and there don't seem to be any Ovi tools to fix it.
Answer:
A. It does seem to be possible for the two contact databases to get so out of step that Ovi Sync just can't seem to merge them successfully. You presumably have a good backup of your phone (otherwise you wouldn't still proclaim that your contacts are 'fine'), which gives us a neat way of solving the problem. Ideally, Ovi would contain a 'Clear all' function, so that you could sync 'up' known good data, but in the absence of this, we recommend:
- In Contacts on the phone, 'Mark all' and then 'Delete', i.e. clear your contacts right down to nothing.
- Do an Ovi sync. This will clear the online version as well.
- Restore from your good phone backup. You contacts are now back on your phone.
- Do another Ovi sync. to write the contacts back up onto the newly-cleared Ovi
