A few months ago I was changing to a new position at work, which meant moving offices and changing computers. It also gave me an opportunity to take about a week of downtime while I transitioned to the new position. I backed up my critical data to CD, boxed up my office supplies, and spent a week with the wife and kids, all the while my Palm Zire 71 sat in one of the boxes beeping away happily at every meeting or appointment I hadn’t bothered to cancel prior to moving out of my old office. Needless to say, it was stone, cold dead by the time I unboxed it in my new office. No problem, I thought. I installed the Palm software on my new computer, copied over the backup data from my CD and synced. Voila, right? Wrong. Most everything synced up just as you’d expect. However, a few of my registered add-on software applications apparently don’t like you to just copy the data from one computer to another and they stopped believing they were registered. Plus, I apparently didn’t do a final sync before packing everything up, and I lost a few bits of data. The good news is that there was nothing I couldn’t get back. But there could have been.

If you’ve ever been paranoid about a situation like that, or sweated through your PDA’s batteries being nearly dead while there was crucial information you hadn’t synced, ProBackup is a necessity for you. In fact, if there’s ever irreplaceable data on your PDA, I’d say that ProBackup is the best investment you could possibly make.

ProBackup is a great little backup program on a 32 Mb SD card (64Mb for Pocket PC). It is about as easy to use as anything could be. Whenever you feel the need to backup, you just pop the SD card into your PDA. It asks you whether you want to Backup or Restore. Choose backup, wait a few seconds, and you’re all done. Since it only backs up changed files, backup is usually blisteringly fast. Restoring is just as easy. Put the SD card in, select Restore, and a moments later your PDA is just the way you left it before the batteries went kaput. I’ve intentionally let my Palm die a few times and even did a hard reset. Restore worked flawlessly every time.

I keep ProBackup in the little SD holder in my case and pop it in at least once a day while I’m waiting for a meeting to start or standing in line for lunch. As a result, I can relax a little more, knowing my data is safe. I’d recommend everyone who owns a PPC or a Palm with a SD slot pick up a copy.

ProBackup is available for Palm and Pocket PC.

ProBackup is suitable for all PalmOS/PocketPC handhelds with MMC/SD card slots and upto 32Mb/64MB of internal memory. This inlcudes the following handhelds:

- Palm m5xx Series
- Palm Zire71
- Palm Tungsten-T
- Palm Tungsten-E
- Palm m130
- Palm Tungsten-C

- iPAQ 3800 Series
- iPAQ 3900 Series
- iPAQ 5000 Series
- iPAQ 1900 Series
- iPAQ 2200 Series
- 02 XDA and compatibles
- 02 XDAII and compatibles
- Toshiba e7xx Series
- Dell Axim

Tucker Hatfield
--Palm Editor


Palm: www.proporta.com/detail.asp?id=382
Pocket PC: www.proporta.com/detail.asp?id=451