A few weeks ago, I was in Las Vegas on a business trip. Armed with my brand new Palm Treo 700P, this trip was the first in years that I've dared to go on without my laptop computer. Halfway through my trip, the worst possible scenario occurred. My phone froze up.
Actually, it was worst than that. It got itself into a state where it would reset itself over and over again. Nothing that I knew to try would stop it. I tried a reset and even taking out the battery. It would just start up again and go through the reset cycles.
To make a long story short, I had to take a cab over to the Verizon store. The guy there asked me the dreaded question, "Do you have a backup of everything on this phone? I need to do a hard reset." I did have a backup -- 2500 miles away. Anyway, I thought I already had done the damage by removing the battery. I said, "go for it".
He did a trick of removing the battery, and replacing it while pressing the power button. THAT's a hard reset. The phone was back to it's out-of-the-box state. All my data gone. It seemed terribly ironic to me that I had a 2GB SD memory card in my phone and still all my data was gone.
Since then, I've done a little research and discovered that third-party applications do exist that will backup everything to the memory card as well as keep a copy of itself on the card for an emergency restore.
The application that I'm testing right now is BackupBuddyVFS by blue nomad. It's a simple application that will backup all your Palm data to the memory card. The pro version will do so on a schedule.
I feel much better now knowing that Las Vegas incident won't happen again. This is one feature that should be standard in the Palm OS. Since it's not, this is one application that you MUST install on your Treo.
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A few weeks ago, I was in Las Vegas on a business trip. Armed with my brand new Palm Treo 700P, this trip was the first in years that I've dared to go on without my laptop computer. Halfway through my trip, the worst possible scenario occurred. My phone froze up.
Actually, it was worst than that. It got itself into a state where it would reset itself over and over again. Nothing that I knew to try would stop it. I tried a reset and even taking out the battery. It would just start up again and go through the reset cycles.
To make a long story short, I had to take a cab over to the Verizon store. The guy there asked me the dreaded question, "Do you have a backup of everything on this phone? I need to do a hard reset." I did have a backup -- 2500 miles away. Anyway, I thought I already had done the damage by removing the battery. I said, "go for it".
He did a trick of removing the battery, and replacing it while pressing the power button. THAT's a hard reset. The phone was back to it's out-of-the-box state. All my data gone. It seemed terribly ironic to me that I had a 2GB SD memory card in my phone and still all my data was gone.
Since then, I've done a little research and discovered that third-party applications do exist that will backup everything to the memory card as well as keep a copy of itself on the card for an emergency restore.
The application that I'm testing right now is BackupBuddyVFS by blue nomad. It's a simple application that will backup all your Palm data to the memory card. The pro version will do so on a schedule.
I feel much better now knowing that Las Vegas incident won't happen again. This is one feature that should be standard in the Palm OS. Since it's not, this is one application that you MUST install on your Treo.