Blackberry Connection Specific Error

Well, I just encountered yet another issue with my blackberry that lost me several hours and data related to synching between my Blackberry and my PC. Over the past week, I kept getting a "Connection Specific Error" when synching with the Blackberry Desktop Manager (which means that my calendar entries were not being synched between outlook and my device). I looked at the log, which just gave me an "Internal Error #4238" message just before cancelling the transaction at the bottom of the log (not very useful)

So, I went to google to find out what the problem might be and how to work around it. Although much of what was out there was close to being right (there seems to be data in one of the calendars that is causing it to crash), much of the focus was on how to delete calendar items in outlook. Unfortunately, my issue happened to be with one of the calendar entries on my device (and not on my PC). I finally figured that out by trial and error (but I could have seen in the progress of the synch that the crash was occuring when reading the device calendar and not the outlook calendar).

So, I ended up deleting all of my future entries in outlook after printing them out to manually enter later (which didn't fix the issue and ended up adding a lot of work).

So, how did you fix it

Well, I ended up having to figure out how to delete everything from my device calendar (which is fine, because I can just re-synch it from outlook). To do this, you will need to go to Desktop Manger on your PC (yes, you have to use your PC to clear your device's calendar!). From there, you double click on Backup and Restore (yes, not where you would expect it to be). Click on the advanced button to see the list of databases on the device. Scroll down to Calenar (in the right hand list) and select it. The clear button will ungray and you can clear the database by clicking on that. You can then re-synch if the problem is the same as mine.

Arrgh

The folks at RIM could have saved me a lot of time by any of the following:

1. Putting more information in the log about what stage of the synch it was on (device), and even what calendar entry that was causing the error.
2. Providing an option to turn on detailed logging from desktop manager
3. Making it easier to clear the database on the device (such as providing the option inside the calendar)
4. Providing better information on the web (most of the links in posts related to my issue had been removed from the RIM support site