I’ve used palm’s hotsync/desktop conduit to backup the data from my palm to my computer. Unfortunately, the software hasn’t been touched by Palm for 3 years. It’s bulky and annoyingly setup, with a required background process if you want to sync at will (I keep it off until necessary), multiple applications, and annoying forced locations of the backup files.
Anyway, due to recent problems with the phone, I had to perform a full reset to delete all applications and whatnot. I used the phone for a while without syncing to restore the old stuff, because I was still having problems with it and also wasn’t sure how to sync without restoring any bad stuff. I recently went through all the backup files and deleted the applications and what looked like related files, allowing me to do the backup.
I was not totally sure what would happen to the stuff that I had done since the phone was backed up, but the word synchronize soothed my fears. I had had pictures, notes, and some important conversations via text messaging that I wanted to save. If I had been smart, I would have created a new profile, backed them up, then tried the old profile, but again, the word synchronize made me feel like it’d be a waste of time. I went ahead and synchronized. It took quite some time.
To see if it actually synchronized, I first checked contacts. The few contacts I had added were indeed safely among the backup contacts. I then looked at the pictures and saw the old photos and the new photos. My hopes were high; it seemed to have synchronized just fine. But then I went to the most important item, the messages. Backed up I had one brief conversation with my brother about zapping PRAM, a message to Paul about not going to an auction plus three spam messages; all things rather unimportant to me. On the phone I had had conversations with two girls from work. One was with a girl who I’ve been strongly attracted to for a while about us talking, with messages spanning over weeks. This one was fairly important to me. The other was with another girl from work whom I had asked to be an anchor for a mock newscast. Most of the messages were about where the shoot was and where she was, but the conversation would still have been nice to have saved. These were gone, not synchronized at all, but replaced with the backup messages. This seems very illogical to me, as there would be no new messages ever generated on the computer, only on the phone. I’m somewhat mad about that. My only consolation is that I had written part of the first conversation in journals on my computer. Not as bad, but still annoying, the call log was also deleted and reverted to backup. This too makes no sense to me. What’s up with that, Palm? Your conduit is in desperate need of an update.