syncing

Rod has an iPhone 12 Pro Max, and when he tries to create a custom label for his three phone numbers, the labels disappear and are replaced by "home." The custom labels disappear. Leo says it could have to do with Syncing. If you're syncing to something that doesn't understand the custom labels feature, that could do it. Look into contacts, then accounts, and see what you're syncing with. See if it syncs with iCloud. If it's Outlook, it may be that Outlook doesn't support custom labels. Google Contacts doesn't mind.

Garth turned on his phone and it suddenly started download information into his contact list. Where did it come from? Leo says that smartphone contact lists often go into social networks and sync information to the contacts list. Facebook, Twitter, and LinkedIn all have that feature.

Angelo bought a Toshiba Laptop with Office 365 and One Drive backup in 2013. When he started to back it up to the cloud, he bought a second computer and now he's lost a lot of data because files were removed when syncing to the secondary computer. So it's deleting files off his original computer. Microsoft doesn't know what to do about it. Leo says that's a good reason to have more than one backup. One Drive is not a backup. It's a file sync system that matches two folders, or two hard drives to make them equal. That means syncing deletes as well as copying files.

Lori is having a problem with her iPad 2. She syncs it over Wi-Fi, but lately when she tries to plug it in to her PC, it won't let her sync. It just requests to restore to a backup. Jason says that the PC is looking at the iPad as if it's a new one and can't identify it. Updating iTunes on the PC and iOS on the iPad could help. The iPad 2 doesn't support iOS 10, though. She may be at the end of the line there. If it offers to set it up as a new iPad, that may be OK, as it pulls the data off the iPad and syncs it. That can be scary, so Lori should have iCloud backup enabled.

Marcus has a new cochlear implant that uses Bluetooth and he wants to know if he can get a regular Bluetooth headset for the other ear and get stereo sound. Leo says it's doable, but he'll have an issue with sync. He'll want to be sure that his implant is A2DP compliant so he can get the best quality sound.

Michele uses Carbonite and she's concerned about how long the backup lasts. Leo says that if she deletes the original on the local drive, the backup drive will be removed about three months later. But if she's syncing it, it'll delete it immediately. Generally, though, backups don't get deleted right away. That's the whole idea.

Kelsey is vision impaired and uses the accessibility settings in both iPhone and Windows 7. Leo says that Apple has done a great job on that in its iOS.

Kelsey is having trouble syncing Gmail with Exchange. Microsoft blames Google, but Google says that Microsoft doesn't even support exchange anymore. The chatroom offers this technote from Microsoft - http://windows.microsoft.com/en-us/windows-8/use-google-windows-8-rt.

Myra is a high school computer science teacher and she's preparing for Science Week's "Hour of Code," by Code.org. She's going to use various methods including Scratch and Alice. Leo says that Alice is a great way to teach kids how to code because it's fun, like a game.

Brian was running backup with Carbonite and his hard drive crashed during the backup. Leo says that's bad luck and is likely a coincidence. Fortunately, Brian had a local backup. Leo says that a good backup strategy is what is known as a 3-2-1 backup. Three copies on two different formats, with one being off-site. Backing up and then deleting the original is not a backup. Redundancy is the key.