Palm Backup's Problem

[Tokyo_Ben]

Over the last couple weeks, since updating to 1.3.1, many people have been learning a lot about Palm Backup and its problems. I just got off the phone with their level 3 customer service department, and I wanted to share some things I've learned.

• Palm's backup servers must have had some sort of failure, but it's "fixed" now.
• Even when their servers are working, Profile Restore can fail.
• Daily backup and manual backup do exactly the same thing (level 1 customer service told me otherwise, but they're wrong).
• Restore only restores the *most recent* backup, even if it's empty!

Palm definitely knows better than this by now. They've been doing Hotsync for their PDAs for years. I never had hotsync overwrite the complete data with empty data.

That said, if you're having a problem with missing contacts, or any other backup data, call Palm. When I talked to the level 3 guy, I had already gotten my contacts back (from my old SIM), but he was able to push an older backup to my phone from their server, but didn't since, as he said, my current backup was larger than my pre-1.3.1 file. So definitely call Palm and they can (eventually) fix your problem. In my case, it took almost 2 weeks, but hopefully that's not the case for everyone.

[bnceo]

This has been covered in another post. But yes, the overall lesson here is to drop Palm Restore and use something else. Google Contacts, Outlook Syncing, etc.