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The day of restores ... Windows Mobile also needed a restore...

Tags: Lotus Traveler Windows Home Server Windows Mobile Device Center
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Some days are just .... days! Just after I had to restore Vista from my Windows Home Server in order to get Windows Mobile Device Center up and running again, I also had to restore my phone .... sigh....
The culprit this time isn't good to nail, but I believe that Lotus Traveler (the software that connects the mobile phone to Domino server) has something to do with it. The problem is the Notes synchronization (yes, the documents from your Personal Journal, which syncs with the "Notes" application on the Windows Mobile), which goes haywire... I have activly used the personal journal to store all kinds of information, such as reference information, ideas and wishlists. Right now I have approximately 670 journal documents. When I first tried to sync all journal documents, I exhausted the main memory on the phone. The problem here is that Lotus Traveler force to store the Notes in main memory, not honoring the setting in the Notes application where you determine where to store new notes. I have by the way made an official wish of this here.

Ok, so I brought over my journal documents chunks by chunks, and for a while I thought I could sneak them over on the phone. But not so. Lotus Traveler suddenly decided that the Notes should have the size of 401 kB each, instead of typically 1-2kb each. Obviously something went wrong. I decided to delete the Notes with the erroneous size just in case, and didn't at that time discover the much more dangerous problem;

Lotus Traveler had also somehow messed up the application storage in main memory. In my My Documents/Ønskeliste-folder (Ønskeliste is "wishlist" in Norwegian), I could all of a sudden see all the application data (!)!, see below:

A picture named M2

Note how My Documents contain Ønskeliste, which again contain My Documents and another copy of Ønskeliste, which finally contains a third copy of the data!!!

To fix this I thought could delete some of the files in the last folders in the hierarchy (the third Ønskeliste-folder), and so I did with the Resco File Explorer 2008. Hmmm, awful many files to delete, I thought, and after a while I received a warning that one of the DLL files was in use!! What!!!, DLL files, I don't have a single DLL file in "Ønskeliste" !!!. It turned out that I was now deleting all the program files - even if they were located in the third Ønskeliste directory. Somehow these files weren't real files, but pointers or lnk-files to the real files.

The result, a very unhappy Windows Mobile phone insisting on a reboot. Needless to say, it never started again (I saw the green Windows Mobile 6.1 boot screen with a keyboard on top of it - thats it!)

Thank God for hard resets!! After a hard reset, my phone was just like new, and I was able to launch the latest Spb Backup's self executable backup file, which worked brilliantly. After a nervous 1/2 hour, my phone was back up and running!!

What did I learn? Something is problematic with Lotus Travelers Notes-synchronization. The 401 kB large documents. Folders going berserk (perhaps since they used the Norwegian character "Ø"?!?). And finally the issue where Traveler aren't able to write to the storage card

PS! Just for curiosity. A normal Spb Backup self executing backup file on my phone is typically 23-30 MB large. The one containing all the folders is over 200MB large. My phone has 100MB available in total, and I know I have approximately 50MB available for data storage in my main memory?!?

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