Synchronizing: How do you sync / synchronize Calendar and Contacts with your desktop?

[bitsandnumbers]

Thank you guys for all your suggestions – so far I checked three of them (GSConnect is still on my list) with different outcomes:

Vdirsyncer
Unfortunately, I lacked the required knowledge and skills to understand the tutorial on http://vdirsyncer.pimutils.org and I could not find tips or even videos anywhere else. Someone very familiar with Vdirsyncer even advised me against using it since it was too cumbersome to use for the intended purpose. He instead recommended Nextcloud.

Syncthing
Is part of the repository and relatively easy to use -- I could set it up within a day. However, I could not find a way to synchronise calendar/contacts and if I did not miss anything, it's not possible without additionally using DecSync. Same problem as with Vdirsyncer: I could not find any info I could comprehend.

Nextcloud
Wonderfully easy to install and to get it to work. Calendar and Contacts on my desktop and on the Pinephone do indeed get the entries from Nextcloud, so it could potentially be the solution I was looking for. However, it does not work the other way around: The data from my desktop and from the pp  does not show up in Nextcloud. Also, the entries from Nextcloud are not saved in the standard files (/home/mobian/.local/share/evolution/addressbook(or calendar)/system/contacts.db (or calendar.ics) and I have no Idea where they end up.

Is it possible to set up Nextcloud in such a way that it 1. actually synchronises Contacts and Calendar in both directions and (maybe less importantly) 2. saves the entries in contacts.db and  calendar.ics?

Any ideas welcome … I don't want to give up at this point.

Maybe you went the wrong way with Nextcloud : you can enable synchronisation in Gnome directly like this, both on desktop and on the Pinephone. It should enable 2-way sync, and you shouldn't need .db or .ics files. You also get remote files access (but be aware that NC installed on a workstation will behave as if it was installed on a server, so your desktop will also need to sync files in a NC folder -- don't pay attention to this if you installed NC on a Pi or anywhere else than your desktop computer).

[Anna]

Maybe you went the wrong way with Nextcloud : you can enable synchronisation in Gnome directly like this,

That is exactly what I did. In this setup, the Calendar/Contacts entries are only transferred from Nextcloud to PP/Computer (not vice versa) where they are not saved properly. Is there any way to change that?

[Anna]

I have found the problem: In order to make Gnome Contacts / Calendar share their entries with Nextcloud, one has to go to Settings/Change Address Book and select the Nextcloud-Calendar in Gnome Contacts -- and do the same when adding a new entry in Calendar.

So I guess I can mark the issue as solved now. In my brief experience, the  simplest way to synchronise contacts and dates between the Pinephone and a desktop computer is to

• install Ubuntu Server in Virtualbox and set up Nextcloud (which is easy and can be quickly done, there are loads of video tutorials)
  
• go to Settings/Online Accounts/Nextcloud on the Pinephone, add the server name etc and choose calendar/contacts and do the same on the computer.
  
• make sure one selects the Nextcloud address book and calendar in Gnome Contacts / Calendar (see above).
  

Now all entries should be synchonised and remain available when offline.

[Anna]

In the end I opted for a rather straightforward method:

On my laptop I bookmarked the directories
sftp://mobian@192.168.0.98/home/mobian/.local/share/evolution/addressbook/system
and
/home/anna/.local/share/evolution/addressbook/system
in order to simply drag the file contacts.db from one directory to the other whenever I have made changes.

Not particularly elegant, but it works without any problems.

[dlarson]

Oh well ... what a topic. Doing all this with a fully fledged desktop is easy, but along comes the Pinephone with its mobile user interface ...

I found it rather difficult to set up a remote calendar with Mobian. I learnt that in a Gnome environment, you use Evolution to set up such an account, but it completely failed to create an ActiveSync account, with error messages that float around the internet for years, but there seems to be no progress in that area -- these projects are all lacking manpower unfortunately. I managed to connect a CardDAV and a CalDAV account with Evolution, though, and had a hard time deactivating a lot of calendars and address books that had been shared with me previously and should not be synced to my phone. But in the end, lo and behold, I got a two-way sync for calendar and addressbook (though I must admit that I to this date only changed the addressbook on the phone).

One drawback of the Gnome calendaring backend seems to be incomplete handling of event exceptions. I previously had a phone with a kcalcore backend, and while it wasn't complete as well, it improved a lot over time and finally was perfectly usable for me. A solution could be to not use exceptions to events, but to create them one by one as separate events instead of series. Another solution could be helping to improve the software itself, obviously.

There is a multitude of things to nit-pick about in conjunction with this topic, but hey, this is a Linux phone ;-) (and ultimately, you could to something about it yourself).

So, in essence: it's working here, sort of. YMMV.

Did your contacts in Evolution work with the address book on the phone so you can dial?   I have got Evolution working and the contacts are there but it is not integration with the phone functionality.

[Maus]

Did your contacts in Evolution work with the address book on the phone so you can dial?   I have got Evolution working and the contacts are there but it is not integration with the phone functionality.

Contacts configured in Evolution automatically propagated to the phonebook, calendar appointments were also automatically configured in the Gnome calendar. Accounts hooked into Gnome's account ecosystem seem to be available to all applications using their libraries (e.g., the "folks" library for contact items). This worked quite nicely. Unfortunately, my Mobian installation has been killed by a rogue install image using EMMC for additional storage ...