TS1627 Syncing Calendar from my iTouch via USB (sync services) is intermittently unreliable. I'm positively not interested in iCloud. Anybody in the same boat?

Question

Today's immediate problem, described below, appears to be solved for the time being, but I expect recurrence based on past experience. I am not sure whether iCal, iTunes, sync services, or some combination are implicated. Does anyone know how to improve USB sync reliability? Is there a magic utility that can spot and repair trouble, or is there a more reliable system out there? A paper calendar maybe
Tonight I discovered a few events that hadn't made it from my iPod touch to iCal. Then I tried creating a couple new events and synchronizing. They remained on the ipod, but would not show up in ical. New events created in ical did get to the ipod though, quite consistently.
I eventually reset and restored my itouch. And reset sync services using terminal:
% /System/Library/Frameworks/SyncServices.framework/Versions/A/Resources/resetsyn c.pl full
Finally I can get new calendar events entered on my ipod to sync to my mac again, but those that failed to sync before still refuse to show up in iCal. They just have to be deleted and re-entered... assuming I can find them all, which I cannot do with certainty, because I can't easily figure out how long the problem has been going on without me realizing it. I'll probably miss an appointment or two, make a few friends and colleagues unhappy. Again.
Current system details: Synching my iPod Touch (gen 4, iOs 6.latest) to my zoomy retina MBP, running 10.8.4. It's an all-apple setup, no third party apps or hardware involved.
The usual/recurrent problems I've seen with syncing the itouch to iCal are:
Events modified on the ipod will be unchanged in ical. Or more rarely, the other way around.
Related to the above, a dialog box will occasionally pop up asking me to resolve sync conflicts. Sometimes lots of them. Usually my ipod has it right, and iCal hasn't caught up. I wish all the errors were caught this way, because it's pretty easy to correct errors by clicking through this interface.
Events entered on the ipod fail to appear in iCal, or vice versa.
Events get replicated, sometimes repeatedly with subsequent sync. They multiply like tribbles.
I generally muddle through using Apple's help pages, run through a few suggestions from the forums (thanks all), and after a long night of resetting various things in various ways, the bit rot is at bay yet again. A month or two down the road, things go wrong in some slightly different way.
Most of the time I have a positive user experience, but it seems the sync zombies are always lurking just beyond the light of the campfire. Is Apple paying attention to sync services anymore, or have they put all their resources into iCloud? I have no interest in iCloud. I don't want another email address to get spam, and am not comfortable keeping my data in the cloud.

Answer 1

Never mind. Turned iCloud on, then off, on the iTouch - then the expected option appeared in iTunes.