Dave Schweisguth in a Bottle

There can’t be many other people left in the world who have a Palm device whose data they want to move to something newer. I mostly used my series of Palm devices for their built-in productivity applications (Contacts, Calendar, Memos, Tasks) and I was happy with the most recent, a Treo, for six years. Although it’s surprisingly tough, having survived many falls onto concrete sidewalks with only a few scratches, I finally managed to break a few pixels in its screen recently. And the Palm Desktop software doesn’t run on Mac OS later than 10.4, so when I finally retire the older of my Mac laptops I won’t be able to sync the Treo. Time to move on.

Another reason I kept the Treo as long as I did is that I wasn’t looking forward to the migration. I’ve used Palms for twelve years, and I intend to keep my data. I expected it would be a significant project to move it all over. It wasn’t as bad as I feared —  Palm Desktop was prepared to bow out gracefully, in that it could export all of its data into standard or at least reasonable formats — but it took enough experimentation and fiddling that I’ve written it down here on the off chance that it will help someone else who still has this job ahead of them.

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