The true value of backing up to an SD card hit me tonight, as I was working on updating my personal Blog site using my Zire 72 while at work. I was actually using AvantGo as a browser to edit some posts on Blogger, because WebPro will not load the Java pages used on Blogger, but AvantGo will, when I found myself somehow caught in a fatal error loop that required reset.
Every time I would Soft Reset, I would receive the error again immediately after the Zire splash screen. Thanks to the recent review I posted on Grassia Network Solutions Palm Powered Desk Reference, I now knew that a Warm Reset would probably fix the problem. I immediately performed a Warm Reset, which restarted my Palm minus the system extensions, and bypassed the error-causing problem. I assumed that the error was somehow related to AvantGo since that was the software I was using when the error first occurred, so I proceeded to delete AvantGo.
I then performed a Soft Reset to restart my Zire and load all system extensions. At this point, everything seemed to be working fine, but AvantGo was absent from my device, and I wouldn't be at my PC to reinstall it for several hours. That's when it occurred to me that I perform a daily backup to SD card using VFSBackup, and I had two days worth of backups on an SD card with me. Simple enough: I popped the card into my device, pulled up the appropriate directory in FileProg, copied and pasted them back to the internal memory on my device, and I was again using AvantGo in no time.
I mention this for several reasons:
1. Without the recent knowledge I picked up in the Palm Powered Desk Reference review, I would probably have performed a Hard Reset to get out of the error loop, and lost all of my data.
2. Without a backup of my data on an SD card, I would not have been able to recover my data in the way I described above, or in the case of performing a Hard Reset.
3. Without a file manager such as FileProg (which is my preference because I find it to be the perfect balance of features and ease of use), I would not have been able to selectively restore only the AvantGo files to my device.
Just thought it might be worthwhile to share some of these thoughts with my fellow PalmAddicts. Best of all, every product and service I mentioned above is free of cost, except for the Palm Powered Desk Reference, which I've already stated is well worth the cost. It saved me from a major headache tonight.
-Jeff Cole, Associate Writer, Indiana USA
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