[missing-sync-palmos-talk] A warning to those who depend on the Backup conduit

[Trevor Harmon]

Hi all,

As far back in 2001, when I got my first Palm device, I have been 
dealing with problems in Palm's Desktop and HotSync software. I 
remember one frustrating experience when I lost 2 weeks' worth of data 
because HotSync's backup feature suddenly decided it would stop making 
updates, even though I was hotsyncing every other day. It wasn't until 
2 weeks later, when my batteries died and I had to restore from backup, 
that I discovered the problem.

After that, I quickly lost faith in the Palm Desktop software and 
looked for other options. I eventually discovered a solution: the 
pilot-xfer (http://pilot-link.org/) utility. It wasn't quite as 
convenient as the regular HotSync, since it was command-line only, but 
I found it to be _far_ more reliable. And it required Linux instead of 
Windows, but that was fine since I was running Linux all the time and 
was only rebooting in order to hotsync anyway!

Flash-forward to 2004: I am a recent Mac convert, but pilot-xfer is no 
longer a good solution for me. It's still super-reliable, but it is 
_extremely_ slow on the Mac because of a compatibility problem that 
requires a special TCP-USB software bridge. I put up with it for 
awhile, but after purchasing a nice new Treo 650, I decided to upgrade 
my sync software, as well. That's what prompted me to buy The Missing 
Sync.

I had assumed that Mark/Space's backup conduit would be just as 
reliable as pilot-xfer, but unfortunately this is not the case, as I 
discovered recently. After installing IBM's Java development kit, my 
Treo suddenly went into an infinite reset loop, forcing a hard reset 
and a loss of all data. I had no qualms about this, since I had just 
performed a hotsync earlier that day, but after restoring I was shocked 
to discover that my backup directory was over two months out of date!

For some reason, The Missing Sync had refused to update my previously 
backed up files, just as Palm's HotSync had done more than three years 
ago. The conduit was only updating a small handful of them, as I 
discovered later, and the only way to fix the problem was to wipe out 
the entire backup directory and let the conduit start over from 
scratch.

Now, I don't want to place blame on Mark/Space, as I seem to remember a 
message from them on this list saying the Palm OS itself is the root of 
this problem. Perhaps there is a long-standing time-stamp bug, which 
may explain why I had the very same backup failure with Palm's own 
HotSync software. (On the other hand, I never had any such problem with 
pilot-xfer in the three years I had used it.) Perhaps someone from 
Mark/Space could provide an update on this issue.

So what's the moral of this story? Just because you get no errors when 
syncing does not necessarily mean you have made a successful backup! 
Even with the latest version of The Missing Sync and a brand-new Palm, 
the occasional backup bug still exists. Be sure to verify your backups 
from time to time. Also, you might want to consider investing in 
additional backup protection such as BackupBuddyVFS or Botzam Backup.

Anyway, long story, I know, but I just wanted to share my experiences 
in the hope that I could prevent another backup disaster from happening 
to someone else.

Trevor