I tell ya, this sync thing needs to work or it’s just a pain in the arse.
I’ve gotten rid of Plaxo because I had the same problem I had with Zimbra - it was silently deleting my data. As far as I can tell, if there were two “Home E-mail”s (or any type of contact point) for a contact, Plaxo would pick one to delete.
In addition, I had trouble with Plaxo creating lots of duplicates of my contacts. They helpfully offered a “remove duplicates” feature as a paid service, but if they didn’t duplicate the data in the first place I wouldn’t have had a need for that service (I didn’t use it).
I know I’ve lost some Address Book data because I used Plaxo for a while and have run into contacts I know I’m missing a specific e-mail address or phone number for, but I have no idea exactly how much I’ve lost or where. I’ll need to go through old backups and compare them to my current data. I guess the best way to do this is to export everything as in vcard format and use a diff tool. I’m not looking forward to that.
One thing that Plaxo did well was include a friendly uninstaller, especially since the Plaxo app seems to get placed somewhere other than the Applications folder. I didn’t actually discover where it was because the first hit in Spotlight for ‘plaxo’ was the uninstaller.
My data is important to me. If you’re a sync tool, you get one chance to work properly - fail and you lose my trust forever.
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Jonathan adds this Comment:
Been there, and I also ditched Plaxo. I had several duplicates in Plaxo (but not in Apple’s Address Book). I didn’t want to pay for the premium account, so I started to manually delete duplicates in Plaxo. I’m glad I didn’t finish because, when I synchronized, Plaxo deleted data from Address Book. It deleted John Doe from Address Book, even though there was just one John Doe in Address Book and one remaining John Doe in Plaxo.
While investigating I came across the following support page (below). Losing data is *very bad*, especially when it’s not obvious that it’s about to happen. So I ditched Plaxo. I don’t trust them with my data.
When using Plaxo to synchronize your data, it is imperative that each of the above referenced label/field combos are used at most once. Otherwise, through the normal operation of keeping your data in sync it is very likely that you would lose data on the fields where a label was used more than once.
February 27th, 2007 at 5:05 pm
Laundro adds this Comment:
Did you ever find a replacement for Plaxo?
February 28th, 2007 at 6:24 pm
Elaine Vigneault adds this Comment:
I’ve had the same problem with Plaxo. But I haven’t ditched it yet. I’ve just stopped using it regularly. Guess I should get rid of it. I hate the duplicates and I’ve lost data too.
March 2nd, 2007 at 9:00 am
Vivienne adds this Comment:
Seriously, has anyone found a Plaxo replacement? This is the third time they have deleted my data and I am dumping them….
April 11th, 2007 at 6:13 pm
Will adds this Comment:
I am looking for a Plaxo replacement too. Not only is the synching unreliable, but since the Plaxo 3.0 upgrade the basic elements are not working. I changed someone’s email address and it too 45 seconds to save.
November 25th, 2007 at 3:34 pm
Lawrence Walker adds this Comment:
I am also experiencing data loss with Plaxo. And I *am* a premium customer, dues-paying and all. I used the de-duper and their cross-sync with Hotmail, Yahoo! and Gmail, in addition to the syncing I was already doing with Outlook and Palm. Plaxo deleted a large number of street addresses, including those of my brother and my best friend. Previously, I was able to restore lost data by going into the “history” function of the data record, but now I find there is no history any more in the “history.” And I’m getting replies to my support and customer service messages to the effect that they do not eliminate data without my permission, so I must have deleted it myself. (From all those platforms? Consciously and deliberately? I don’t think so…) I don’t care at this point whether there is an alternative to Plaxo or not, because lost data are lost data. At this point a paper address book would have been far preferable!
June 27th, 2008 at 11:45 pm