A few days ago I helped my brother in-law recover his “lost” addressbook. It disappeared from his Mac and he sync’ed his palm assuming that the contacts would be put back in place. Not so — instead, the “newer” empty addressbook overwrote the palm. We were able to recover the address book through a hidden backup copy, however tonight I got hit with the exact same bug.
Unfortunately, in my case, there was no .previous file to recover from. Fortunately, missing sync is better about giving me the choice of what to do when I sync, so as soon as my palm finishes backing itself up to the SD card (just in case), I’ll sync it and hopefully restore all the contacts. If that fails, I’ll have to recover from a backup taken a few days ago to another machine in the house. It’s good having a backup system in place, but it sucks having to use it.
When I had an older style (Windows Mobile 2001) Toshiba PocketPC (that was when the system memory was ALL VOLATILE) I got into the habit of backing up the entire system to a self-restoring executable on the SD card on nearly a daily basis. So I will have to agree with you, backups are good, but having to use them is bad!
On a flipside tangent, I now use a WM5 PocketPC phone (xv6700), which thankfully has flash memory for the system memory. Unfortunately, the 4gb microSD card from ebay seems to get corrupted all the flippin’ time so that I can’t store much of anything on it - now my only reliable storage IS the system memory…. lame. Moral: don’t buy unbranded large memory cards from eBay?
Left by Sean on October 5th, 2007