I have recently acquired a C2 and have managed to import Calendar and Contacts from my Linux PC. (I have yet to find a way of importing my Tasks and Notes.)
I have been using my trusty Palm Treo 680 with the excellent J-Pilot PIM for some decades. J-Pilot is similar to Evolution (PIM for GNOME) minus the email capability, and works exclusively with Palm devices.
As you will appreciate, the Treo is long past it’s bedtime, which is why I bought the C2.
What I would like to do is have the C2 sync Contacts, Calendar, Tasks & Notes with my desktop. Evolution on my desktop used to sync PIM data with my old WinCE handheld over USB. It would be nice if I could sync Evolution with my C2 Contacts, Calendar, Tasks & Notes.
I am reluctant to depend on any online / cloud-based methods which are outside my control. (None of these can be more secure / dependable than a USB cable in any case!)
As I say, Evolution used to sync by USB with my WinCE handheld via ActiveSync.
I believe it can sync with other devices that support ActiveSync or SyncML.
I have no idea where to start with this.
Any suggestions or advice will be gratefully received.
Selfhost. I appreciate that it’s not for everybody, but then it’s all just one application: a CalDAV/CardDAV server like e.g. Radicale. And fair warning, afaik the Notes app on SfOS is not syncable in this way.
You say Evolution, so you use Linux on desktop? In that case you should enquire deeper if Evolution cannot be made to do what you want. Or the selfhosting is local to your machine. Or you execute a script via Udev whenever your phone connects. Or look into KDEconnect…
Greetings, fellow Palm user, and congratulations! You held out longer than I did (until 2018, when I could no longer source replacement devices). You will find that nothing matches the convenience and system efficiency of a Palm device, except that capacitive touch screens don’t die from intense Graffiti input.
Having said that, I’m pleased with my Sailfish devices. For syncing, I second the opinion of @ohnonot that selfhosting is a good way - and I think you should be able to set up a server on your PC and have local sync. A Sailfish phone turns up with an IP address when attached to a computer with a USB cable.
For syncing with someone else’s server, consider a NextCloud instance run by someone you trust or an Etesync server which you don’t need to trust due to encryption being end-to-end.
Wunderftp from openrepos to run FTP on the SFOS phone
a target drive for mirroring in your local network (can be a shared folder on a laptop, I use a microserver with a mirroring folder within my local network)
a laptop running FreeFileSync (I use a Debian Linux Laptop). In FreeFileSync app you have a GUI, in one panel you enter the IP and port of Wunderftp, in the other the shared, to be mirrored folder of your backup device.
now you can sync the selected SFOS folder in which you collected all files you want to save to your network target folder
This setup does not require any cloud, all data stay within your own network. This setup can in principle be adopted to many requirements. I am not sure if I understood your setup requirements correctly, but the flexibility should permit adoption to your needs.
I use this procedure to regularly sync contacts, ebooks, music and all other files between SFOS phone internal storage and LAN folders back and forth.
Wow… that’s a solution I’ve never thought about, even though I’ve been engaged in FreeFileSync for many years. Mostly as translator, but anyway. This is the fucking solution I’ve been looking for, not wanting to set up my own server solution.
Can you please make a more detailed wiki? I will definitely try it!
Yes. I had hoped & expected that a PIM app that syncs with a PC by USB would be(come) available for smartphones, but decades on still nothing.
It looks like self-hosting is the solution I’m looking for, though I have no idea where to start with this. I have been looking into setting up a Raspberry Pi-based NAS for bulk storage and back-up. Maybe I could also use that for my server?
FWIW, ssh - SfOS main tool for remote-connecting - includes sftp (i.e. secure file transport) and if e.g. you mount your phone on your desktop with sshfs, it automatically uses sftp.
If you want to keep folders in (two-way-) sync between hosts, unison is probably the best choice. It uses the rsync algorithm on top of ssh. The Debian binary works on Sailfish (just tested on SFOS 5.1).
For contacts and calendar I use a self-hosted radicale server, though.
I only tried WunderFTP, it just worked out immediately once I figured out how to use FTP with Freefilesync. So, there was no need for another FTP service to try.
Since I use this setup in my intranet only, and since the microserver is switched on only at demand, I did not use sFTP.
Wiki is good idea, currently I am super busy, need to reserve a slot for this in later summer…
Does Freefilesync work good? I have never used it since i use Syncthing for my computers. I haven’t had any need for it on sailfish but searching there seem to be a sailfish app harbour-Syncthing.
Does freefilesync provide any functuonallity not in syncthing?
FreeFileSync is very good. You actually get two applications in one installer… FreeFileSync and RealTimeSync. I used it for many years to synk my three PC’s and to make backup of /Home, but somehow I dropped it when one PC was all I needed (I was retired). Here’s some reading for you…
I second that, Freefilesync is my favorite synchronization tool for many many years in my local Debian Linux environment. I prefer to have everything locally without any accounts in the cloud.
I just does the job reliably, I cannot tell how many years, maybe 2010 or so?
Highly recommended
Right. Early on, there was even Network Hotsync, so you could sync with your PC using a colleague’s cradle. But the Hotsync protocol didn’t spread outside the Palm ecosystem and I think the “other one” (was it called SyncML?) seems long gone.
I guess people just saw convenience when the big two centralized all the worlds calendars on their servers, with at least G not even offering standard protocols to sync elsewhere. To be fair, using Hotsync for multiple devices (say, Palm, laptop and desktop PC) was problematic.
That should work well. One easy way could be using Yunohost. It gives you an easy way to host a multitude of apps, in case you don’t want to get deep into the details yourself.
