HTC Sync is awful - alternative?

[r3dplanet]

Hello.

I recently purchased an HTC One (M8) and attempted to sync it to my PC so that I can synchronize Outlook Contacts. That was a mistake. After fighting and fighting with the software (it kept freezing and messing up my USB drivers) I was able to sync the data. Except that it didn't sync. Instead it just obliterated all of the data within each of my Outlook contacts. Now I have hundreds of empty contacts. Thanks HTC! Tech support was no help.

My question is this: is there a better sync tool that has a feature where it won't destroy my data? Also, I'm not interested in any kind of online/cloud sync. My data is mine.

Thanks!

 

[Rukbat]

Are you talking about Outlook that you're running on your own computer, with accounts like Google, Yahoo, etc? If so, export the contacts from Outlook, then import them to the phone. (Depending on the file types you can export to, you may have to use an intermediary like Google Contacts which can handle more file types than the phone can.

If you're talking about Outlook connected to an Exchange Server account, talk to the Exchange Server administrator. How you do it depends on how Exchange was set up.

(If you want continual syncing - every time you change a contact on one, it changes on the other- there are various apps - some of which work better than others, but I haven't heard of any that work as well as Google syncs its contacts.)

BTW, with any of the larger name cloud accounts, no one looks at your data. (An employee found looking around in other people's accounts is lucky to get fired on the spot and not even get a "he worked here from this date to that date" reference - he's more likely to get a "sorry, we can't find that name in our records" reference - meaning that if you look at other people's data you'll be lucky to get a "job" collecting used cans for recycling money. There are many software houses that have access to not just contact info, but things like HIPPA data [which can't be disclosed without the consent of the person whose data it is, under federal law] and they've never had a problem with "stolen data". I know this personally - I've converted data formats on many medical databases, and could have looked up all the data I wanted to. People who want to very quickly end up saying "would you like fries with that" for a living. If, after I had corrected a record and was starting on the next one, you had asked me about the one I just finished, I wouldn't have been able to find it, unless one of the fields was "time last changed". You do the work without paying attention to the data itself - a zipcode starting with 6 for someone in Boston is wrong and you look up the correct one, change it and, possibly but not likely, remember "Boston" for about a minute.)

Not putting all your contacts from an Android phone on Google Contacts is foolish - if you don't have a backup file, and something happens to the phone, you're in for days of trying to reconstruct your contact list. If all your contacts are on Google, you don't spend any time - the new phone you get to replace the bad one just syncs up automatically. (If any contacts had ever been stolen from Google, it would have been all over the web in less than an hour.)