Synchronization with Mobile Phone

[gilcarrick]

I am using Windows Vista Ultimate Edition. I have a Samsung Blackjack II. I use Textpad to edit several text files that I keep on my phone as reference material. I use the Sync Center to synchronize these files to the phone. After I edit a file and save it, sync center will copy it to the phone. No problem there. But there two issues, one small and one larger. The small issue is that after the sync center copies the file, next time I go back to the Textpad window I will get a popup that tells me that "another application has updated the file, do you want to reload it." If I say yes, then the window closes with no apparent change to the file. This is not damaging, but it is annoying. The major problem happens if I make some changes but do not save the file for a while. Then I get the same popup, and if I say yes, it will replace my edited version with the old version from the phone. This can be a big problem. An of course, if I am not paying very close attention it is very easy to loose a lot of work. This may be a Sync Center issue, but I thought I would ask here. Any suggestions will be welcome.

[ak47wong]

It sounds like Sync Center is updating the time stamp of the file when you synchronize. There are options in TextPad to control whether it detects that other applications have updated a file. Click Configure->Preferences->File and look at the options under When files are modified by another process. Selecting Ignore should solve your problems.

(You can also try leaving Prompt selected but changing the value of Check for file size changes. However, when I tested this on XP Pro SP2, I found this option makes no difference at all.)

Andrew

[gilcarrick]

Thanks for the input. I will look to see if that is the case. But I can't just ignore changed files because sometimes I change the files on the phone. It does have a qwerty keyboard. I guess what I want is to figure out how to get the sync application not to "touch" whichever time stamp it is messing with. IIRC, Vista has a bunch of time stamps. Maybe TextPad is looking at a time stamp that is not the best one. There should be one that says something like last date/time written or last date/time changed. But maybe the phone is changing the wrong stamp when it imports the file and that stamp is getting synced back to the PC.

[talleyrand]

Some guesses here but

dir /?
{snip}
/T Controls which time field displayed or used for sorting timefield
C Creation
A Last Access
W Last Written

Sync Center is updating the Last Access time on the file. The default view from Explorer should be Last Written but maybe the act of updating the Last Access date is causing TP to think the file has been updated.

To test,
1) create a file C:\foo.txt and leave it open
2) From a command window (Start->run CMD)
dir C:\foo.txt /t:W
dir C:\foo.txt /t:A
3) Connect/synch the mobile phone
4) Verify TP has displayed "the file's been updated" window
5) Rerun 2 and compare values