Doubling up, then loosing contacts

[Guest petec500]

I have an HTC Touch, which i have successfully synchronised with both my home and work PCs using Active Sync. I've also installed and started using PocketCM to view and manage my contacts.

However, after several syncs over several days, i started to notice some apparently random duplicate and even triplicate entries in my Contacts - but only on my phone, not on either PC. So, i started to delete the duplicates on my phone through PocketCM, but noticed i could only delete the second entry, never the third for some reason. Anyway, after much mucking about, i realised that if i killed PocketCM in Task Manager, then re-run it, not only had the duplicates and triplicates all disappeared, but the original entries too, leaving me with some contacts missing entirely! Without thinking, i connected it to my work PC in the hope it would re-install the missing entries, but of course it recognised that i had deleted them from the Touch as the last update and hence proceeded to delete them from my work PC too! I have a back-up phone (my old Qtek8310) which had my full contacts on, so i sync'd that with the work PC also, but of course it deleted these contacts from the 8310 too!

I have one last back-up device - my old (surprisingly huge and heavy!) O2 xda Mk1 that also has my full contacts on, but i dont want to sync this until i know how to ensure i dont loose the contacts deleted from my Touch, 8310 and work PC. I also have my contacts backed up on my home PC currently.

So, what do i do to get my contacts back? I've tried beaming them using IR from the xda to the 8310, but it doesn't seem to work. The 8310 flashes up a message so quickly that i cant read it, then goes back to the home screen without accepting the beam, even though i've gone through the settings page to accept beams.

Help!!!

[Guest petec500]

Managed to sort it. I deleted all the partnerships on my Work PC ActiveSync, then connected my old xda (which still had my complete contacts list. I then chose to merge the contacts on my device with the pc, hence ensuring that the ones i'd lost on my PC were replaced. I then sync'd both the 8310 and Touch to ensure they both got the full set too. Job done!

Still dont know why contacts sometimes double up when using ActiveSync. Perhaps i'll do some research on the Microsoft website on this.