4. Coldsync

Coldsync is an alternative to the pilot-link suite for transferring data to and from your PalmOS device. Like pilot-link, it can synchronise, backup and restore Palm databases.

There are fewer applications available which use coldsync as their backend. That may change, but it seems to reflect a difference in philosophy between coldsync and pilot-link. Applications that sync using pilot-link tend to build in the functionality for synchronisation. It is therefore the author of the application that decides to include pilot-link support.

Coldsync takes a different approach. Conduits can be written to use coldsync with almost any application. The synchronisation process can be entirely transparent to the application. If the application author is not interested in adding PDA support, it does not matter. As long as the data format of the application is available, someone else can write the conduit.

4.1. Installing coldsync

Some Linux distributions are carrying coldsync, but it is not yet as widely available as pilot-link. It is also a younger application, so you are more likely to need to compile from source.

You can find the latest release of coldsync at www.ooblick.com/software/coldsync. As well as the current version, you will find a link to the latest CVS snapshot.

Once you have the downloaded the source, compile it as follows:

tar -xvzf
colsync-2.2.5.tar.gz
cd coldsync-2.2.5
./configure
make
make install

You can run coldsync directly from the src directory. For more information, see the README file that comes with coldsync.

4.2. Using coldsync