There's a saying among paranoid technophiles such as myself... "You never know how good your backups are until you have to use them". Oh, how true that is...
You might recall a review I wrote previously in which I tried to port my historical data out of the freeware password storage tool, STRIP, into SplashID. Along the way, I tried syncing my Treo 650 to a linux host to export the data via a perl script. Sadly, the end result was a forced hard reset, and even more sadly, I had no backups, so I was back to installing all my favorite apps from scratch (which was a good thing in terms of removing historical junk, but a bad thing in terms of downtime for my Treo and the resultant loss of productivity and connectivity). As the saying goes, "hindsight is always 20/20" and I immediately went searching for a good backup solution for my Treo.
I've been using BackupBuddyVFS for close to two months now. And, quite honestly, it was sort of a "set it and forget it" application. I made an initial backup then setup a schedule to backup in the background each night at 2am. Last week, though, I found out just how useful BackupBuddy is. You see, I've long been a hacker at heart, so last week I tried to play with a special build of the [non-Treo-friendly] NetFront browser and after installing it was forced to hard reset. I can't tell you the panic I felt as the "oh no, not again..." feelings crept up on me, but then I remembered I had Backup Buddy installed. So after a hard reset, I simply chose to do a full restore from the previous night's 2am backup. The restore completed within less than a minute, I was prompted to reset, and after I was 95% working. Why only 95% and not 100%??? Well, I also use GoodLink and even though BackupBuddy successfully backed up and restored all the GoodLink files, GL decided it didn't want to work. GL has its own backup function, one that I had neglected to use after the aforementioned forced reset with STRIP. In the end, I simply did another hard reset, but this time did a selective restore from BackupBuddy of everything except the GL files. I then re-downloaded and re-provisioned GL and was back to a 100% working status. And this time, I made a backup of just GoodLink via their backup tool. Not being one to wonder if I had a 100% working solution, I did one more hard reset.
After, I did a selective restore via Backup Buddy of everything except the GL files, reset, then restore GoodLink from their backup/restore function, then reset again. After this, absolutely everything was working as though I had never reset my Treo to begin with.
And, I now have peace of mind again, which is a good thing for someone that's constantly installing this or trying that. :) BackupBuddy is most definitely on my list of recommended applications, one I would gladly pay for again (if needed), and one that will be on all Palm devices I own.
So two days ago I broke my second Palm T|X in two months. Both times they were in the fantastic cases made by Vaja and Piel Frama. Nothing against those case makers, their products didn't cause the breakage. What I think happened was that since the cases are leather and though firm, they aren't solid, like metal. I must have bumped it. Plain and simple. Oh well... I considered giving up on Palm and PDAs completely, but I'm a PalmAddict and that'll never happen so I shelled out another $317.00USD for another one. Now I keep it in my metal case by Brando!
We want to hear from as many of you as possible on this one. We want as many of you as possible to tell us just 1 [you can more if you want] reason why you use a Palm device. 
SUNNYVALE, Calif., Aug 01, 2006 (BUSINESS WIRE) -- Palm, Inc. (Nasdaq:PALM) executives are scheduled to present at the following financial conferences during the month of August: 
[From Leon Menzies] Hi Sammy, hope your having a great vacation, you certainly deserve it. Anyway never mind the Treo I have just gotten a new LifeDrive and it's awesome. I have a video iPod with an awesome screen, good memory and it doubles as a PDA than can connect via wifi and download my emails. It can run rings around the Nokia 770. Happy to be a Palm Addict with my LifeDrive.
