Pre Backup - can you trust it?

[GoBears]

Palm claims they backup your Pre every day, and they want you to depend on them and trust them? But can you? I don't think so. Here's why.

On my office network, we use a "3 step" backup strategy. We do a daily partial backup, a weekly deeper backup, and a monthly total backup. That way, if one of the backups is lost or corrupted, you can still restore data from one or more backup sets.

With the Pre, I believe they only save the most recent backup. So if your backup is lost or corrupted, you are lost. And that is just what happened to me.

I upgraded to 1.2, and the Pre said that my backup couldn't be found. So all my contacts, calendars, etc, were gone and my phone was empty! Then, later in the day the system automatically backed up my Pre.This backup was empty, and overwrote any genuine backup Palm had for me, so by depending on Palm I lost everything!

Has anyone else noticed that there doesn't seem to be a way to manually restore your backup? No way to verify that your data has indeed been backed up? In case of data loss, no way to choose which backup to restore? No way to restore, say, a backup from last week or last month? In other words, the user has no control over the backup process.

If I choose to keep my Pre (questionable at this time since Palm wiped out all my data), I assure you I will buy software to allow me to backup up my own data, and not depend on Palm.

[davis.rob]

Use Google contacts and calendar. You have access from anywhere, and can export the Google data to CSV files on your PC for your extra level of backup. I don't really understand why anyone would chose the Palm Profile over Google?

[pacha248]

I have experienced the same thing and now I use google.

[cripita]

Same here, migrate to Google too...

[xtn]

yup. After visiting the good Doctor and then logging back into my Palm profile, I only got back a very few of my contacts.

I started over from scratch spending about four hours rebuilding them by hand from whatever resources I could find, this time with google as the default profile.

During the rebuild, the new webOS 1.2.0 feature of sending a contact vcard by sms came in handy, as my wife has at least some of the same contacts in her phone.

xtn

[KnoxBNYC]

I just posted this in a new thread, but since you're talking about backups:

http://forums.precentral.net/general...up-broken.html

I was just doing some housekeeping on my Pre in the Contacts.... After making a bunch of changes, I decided to be smart and force a backup...

When I went into the Backup app, I was dismayed to find:

"Your data is backed up automatically every day."

"Last Backup: 9/28/09" (Today is 10/2/09).

That was FOUR days ago!!

Yes, auto was set to "ON."

Anybody else notice this? Is it backing up and not reporting the date correctly, or is it truly not backing up on a daily basis now like it says?

Any ideas??

[nkthornton]

I, too, had a period where the auto backup did not occur. Figuring that like all electronics today, maybe a reboot would help, I went to Devic Info and did a Restart then a "backup now". It fixed the problem and has worked since.

[KnoxBNYC]

Originally Posted by nkthornton

I, too, had a period where the auto backup did not occur. Figuring that like all electronics today, maybe a reboot would help, I went to Devic Info and did a Restart then a "backup now". It fixed the problem and has worked since.

Interesting. Thanks for sharing your experience. Appreciated

[GoBears]

Originally Posted by KnoxBNYC

I just posted this in a new thread, but since you're talking about backups:

http://forums.precentral.net/general...up-broken.html

Any ideas??

The Pre misses backups. That is one problem. But I think the bigger problems are:

• the end-user has no way of knowing if backups have actually been performed
• no way of knowing what is in them
• no way of forcing a manual restore, if his data is lost or corrupted

This is just not a useful backup system, and I resent that the palm.com web site says, "Safeguard important information with automatic backups of selected data." (selected data meaning contacts, calendars, notes, etc.) I believed them, and I lost all my data. And no one at Palm has been willing to help me, either. The "Level 5 Storage Engineers" said they may be able to get to it in a week or 10 days.

As I have said before, if Palm really wants to sell a useful business tool, they had better take this issue more seriously!

[KnoxBNYC]

Originally Posted by GoBears

The Pre misses backups. That is one problem. But I think the bigger problems are:

• the end-user has no way of knowing if backups have actually been performed
• no way of knowing what is in them
• no way of forcing a manual restore, if his data is lost or corrupted

This is just not a useful backup system, and I resent that the palm.com web site says, "Safeguard important information with automatic backups of selected data." (selected data meaning contacts, calendars, notes, etc.) I believed them, and I lost all my data. And no one at Palm has been willing to help me, either. The "Level 5 Storage Engineers" said they may be able to get to it in a week or 10 days.

As I have said before, if Palm really wants to sell a useful business tool, they had better take this issue more seriously!

I agree with you on all points.

I also find it frustrating that synergy "links" are not stored. So all the contact entries that I MANUALLY link together (there are quite a few for me) have to be redone from scratch after a restore.

[whippingboy]

Can someone explain why Palm refuses us to do a manual backup via USB (not wifi) of the entire device? Even if you include the hidden partition what are we talking about 10GB? Why can't they publish a dang cloning tool- heck this would help retailers when someone walks in w/ a broken pre- hook 2 together and clone the phone.

ALL Smartphones - ANY phone should have this feature- any lawyers here to discuss the legality of companies NOT providing the means to OUR content? When the pre shipped there was no way to export via VCARD- even now you can't dump the PIM data to a computer or even back up to the visible 8GB user accessable partition.

I left palm / handspring around the Palm IIIx because no touchscreen lasted me a year of regular daily use- now I'm back and they still can't provide a device that works.

[daveron]

This same thing happened on one of my pre's. I did a partial restore and expected it to pull back all my contacts from backup, only it said my palm profile didn't even exist. A call to customer care indicated there was no profile set up for my device even though I had set one up and it was indicating backups.

We really do need a way to backup our devices by hand. palm's backup can't be trusted.

[Dr.Grace]

I've been saying this for a long time--ever since I had to do a total erase after installing OS version 1.03 and my contacts and many other things were not restored properly.

Some enterprising developer could make money by creating an app that could backup and restore the pre-existing state of the device PERFECTLY. I doubt that Palm will ever get around to doing this. In fact, that's what happened with the old Treo/Centro line: we depended on third-party apps for backup. At least those devices had a removable expansion card for instantaneous local backup/restore.

The "cloud" idea sounds good, but the present implementation of it is seriously flawed. And what happens when you're traveling in an area with no signal and no WiFi?

[Really mobile]

Here's a related article:

Sidekick™ - T-Mobile Forums

"...Regrettably, based on Microsoft/Danger's latest recovery assessment of their systems, we must now inform you that personal information stored on your device - such as contacts, calendar entries, to-do lists or photos - that is no longer on your Sidekick almost certainly has been lost as a result of a server failure at Microsoft/Danger..."