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Bento™ can make use of iCal and Address Book data and this is one of the strengths and selling points of the application. However this area could do with some additional explanation as there are some potential issues which you should be aware of.

Bento does not actually store its own copy of your Address Book and iCal data, rather it links in with the existing databases for those applications. This means that when you backup your Bento data you are not actually backing up the data in iCal and Address Book.

However if, for example, you add some additional fields to your Address Book data in Bento then these fields are stored in Bento and Bento simply links these fields and the data in their records to the records in your Address Book. This is done via an internal ID which Address Book uses to identify each record. A similar situation occurs with iCal, an internal ID in iCal is used by Bento to link the data. Similarly, if you have a Library which contains a Related Records List and that is populated with Address Book or iCal data then it is really the Address Book or iCal IDs which are stored.

The danger is that if that ID in Address Book or iCal changes then the link in Bento is lost and the Address Book or iCal data is no longer associated to the Bento data properly.

Some ways in which the ID field can change include:

• Using Disk Utility to repair permissions can change the ID if there is a corruption in the iCal or Address Book data.
• Data synchronised via .Mac may not keep a common ID so copying a bento.bentodb file from, say a home to a work Mac may break the links even if the Address Book and iCal data is synchronised via .Mac.
• Restoring the Address Book data from a backup, especially if the data has changed.

It is also worth noting that turning off the iCal and Address Book functionality in Bento will cause Bento to internally remove the links so if you are using iCal and Address Book data don’t turn it off! If this does happen then you can re-enable iCal and Address Book and try reverting to a backup which may well have the correct links still established.

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