Google App Sync and the Insane Notes Choices

The recent versions of Google App sync include the ability to sync Notes along with the more traditional Calendar, Email and Tasks. The only problem with this is that the method for doing so does not appear to be sane: I have 87GB uploaded (among hundreds of thousands of files) in a folder that Google decided (for reasons which remain unclear) to search for notes.

This is a highly time consuming process, but it is made worse by the fact it is apparently confused by music files and archives. My "Local Sync Errors" folder now contains over 600,000 errors, noting the inability to turn things such as R.E.M.'s Automatic for the People into Notes.

There is a way out of this issue however: there are registry entries[1] that allow for the removal of sync components while leaving the other components enabled. In the key HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Google\Google Apps Sync you can create the DWORD entry SyncFlagsEnabled (set to value 1) and then create a Key for the specific product to disable. In my case, this was notes that I wanted to disable, so HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Google\Google Apps Sync\NotesSync. Within this new key, two values are available (both DWORDS): DownloadEnabled and UploadEnabled. When set to zero, the approriate direction will be shut down, if both are set to zero then the feature disappears from the status display when syncing.

Now to figure out a clean way to deleted 600K error messages without locking Outlook for hours...

[1] Configure options via the registry - Google Apps