Blessed by the Potato

After my dad got his USB thumbdrive/memory stick and synchronization software, it worked quite well for about 6 months. It wasn’t the “cruzersync” software, which as mentioned previously was useless for synchronizing two computers. He ended up buying a program called “Carry It Easy Plus” which worked quite well and intuitively for him, even though I thought $25 was a little steep for a program that basically automated copying & pasting.

Of course, it only worked quite well for about 6 months. Last week for no reason at all, it started misbehaving in a particularly nasty way. Instead of faithfully copying his Quicken files to the stick, and then from the stick to his other computer, it deleted his Quicken program and data files. I shouldn’t say deleted, since technically that’s not what happened (and a delete might have landed something in the recycle bin to restore). It actually decided to overwrite his data with files of 0 size. So first his Quicken program wouldn’t even open, and then after I got the program up and running, we found that his data was gone. This is, I can not say it enough, not the expected behaviour of a commercial product.

Miraculously, he still had mostly up-to-date unsynchronized Quicken files on one computer, so we were able to recover. He suspected that it was the fault of the stick writing/transferring data improperly, so I ran out to buy him another U3-capable USB drive. We reinstalled the Carry It Easy Plus program, and did a test synchronization. It worked pretty good on one computer. I left it with him, and he synchronized again on Friday with his home computer, then went up to the cottage and synchronized with his cottage computer. That’s when all hell broke loose again. The Quicken program files were overwitten, the data was erased, and it looked like his weekend at the cottage wasn’t going to be very productive. My mom, who was heading up a day after him, brought up his home computer… and the data on it was gone too. This is the part where it goes from nasty bug to simply inexcusable: how on earth did the stick, copying the obviously most recent data from his home computer, manage to erase it in the copying process?

So now I’m walking him through the process of restoring the backup I made for him last week, which is quite painful (“ok, now paste that in” “we just did this… but how do I paste again?” “go to edit, dad…”), and for the next while we’re going to avoid Carry It Easy Plus like the plague and get him to synchronize the old-fashioned way, as painful as that is.

I was looking up the contact information to get some support or at least vent a nasty letter their way, but my dad said not to bother: after deleting his most valuable data, there’s really nothing they can do to make it right, and as handy as the program was for the last 6 months or so, he’s lost all faith in it and won’t try it again after this…