fettig.net

A few days ago my iPhone stopped syncing correctly. When I tried to sync I would get a message that contact syncing had failed because “the sync server failed to sync the iphone”. If I disabled contact syncing, calendar synching would fail with the same error message, and if I disabled calendar syncing too, bookmarking synching would fail. I found a few people talking about the problem, but none of the suggested solutions (including restoring my iPhone) worked for me.

Finally I came across a weblog entry that mentioned looking at the console to see the sync log. I opened /Applications/Console and saw this message:


2008-02-18 22:57:38.111 AppleMobileSync[652] CFLog (0):
CFPropertyListCreateFromXMLData(): plist parse failed; the data is not proper UTF-8. The file name for this data could be:
/Users/abe/Library/Application Support/SyncServices/Local/clientdata/[really long numerical directory]/[really long numerical file name]


Apparently that file with the really long name was causing the problem. So I went ahead and moved it out of the way (I put it on my desktop so I could restore it if it turned out to be important). Then I tried to sync again… and it worked! I did get a couple of messages about resolving sync conflicts, but they were easily resolved and now everything appears to be working fine.

Take this for what it’s worth; I don’t know if this will work for you, or make matters worse. I have no idea what that file was supposed to do, and randomly removing application files from your computer is generally a bad idea. But if you’ve got a similar iPhone syncing problem, and nothing else works, you might want to check your Console log and see if there’s a similar file causing your problem.