On 6/8/06 9:40 AM, "Paul Berkowitz" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
> There are going to be far, far more people who depend on these functions - > and some who even buy Office specifically for these functions - than the few > of you who use a third party sync app. > > Now that Entourage offers SyncServices, you can get part way there using > .Mac (no categories, no tasks, no notes -but presumably you don't use tasks > much if you don't use Office Notifications). Paul, Thank you for your considered response. Permit me to say that I appreciate your offering examples as opposed to Jud's (uncharacteristic for him, I believe) "we know best, so take it or leave it" reply. Bryan Harris contributed to this discussion and made my point more clearly than I did. The issue at hand isn't something that befuddles just those few who use third party sync apps. We're all reminded regularly to back up our data, but often many programs maintain that data in some monolithic structure that requires backing up multiple gigabytes because of a miniscule change (which in some cases may be NO change - only the fact that the data was looked at). In some ways, this is the same discussion that's blossomed here from time to time regarding storing single email messages vs. the monolithic database file. I'm not a programmer, just an end-user, but these programs exist for their users, and at least THIS user hopes that software developers will realize that most of us don't have huge multi-disk arrays for backup. You've pointed out many ways that Word can need Entourage data. I would suggest that unless Word (or some other Office app) actually CHANGES that data - or at least makes an explicit glance at some of it - it doesn't make sense to throw a user's backup routine into disarray just because (for example) a user opened a Word doc he'd received as a web download. I would think it would be relatively trivial to implement a metadata file approach to this; e.g., recording Entourage database "openings" differently from Entourage database "write-tos." In other words, if a 2-bit pointer to a 2-gigabyte database changes, it makes more sense to back up the pointer than the entire database. Jim Robertson -- -- To unsubscribe: <mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED]> archives: <http://www.mail-archive.com/entourage-talk%40lists.letterrip.com/> old-archive: <http://www.mail-archive.com/entourage-talk%40lists.boingo.com/>
