This morning I had one of those real sinking feeling moments. I got to work, pulled out my Dell Axim PDA and plugged it into it’s cradle hooked up to my PC and rather than the usual screen was greeted with a big error message stating that there was memory corruption and asking me to press one of the buttons to continue. Pressing this caused the PDA to reboot, and then go through the first start-up screen calibration routine before dumping me at an empty today screen.
Now this isn’t the first time this has happened. The first time I had to reinstall all my applications, fix all the configuration – basically it was a long job. After that experience I looked around and bought a copy of Sprite Backup a bit of software that does a significantly better job of backing up a Pocket PC device than the included option. Every morning when I plug in my PDA it automatically takes a backup of the contents of the device – this morning I was very grateful that it did.
The only thing I had to install back onto my PDA was the Sprite Backup software, and then I just had to configure that to use the ActiveSync connection to talk to the other part of Sprite Backup on the PC. Then I just had to select my last daily backup and click the start button. Twenty minutes later after replacing all the missing files and putting back on all my settings the PDA rebooted and everything looked as it should. Then you only have to wait a few minutes whilst ActiveSync, which unfortunately decides that all the replaced contacts and calendar entries are new sorts itself out (just a question of letting it replace the data – the stuff in Outlook is probably more up to date than the backup anyway), and then everything is back to normal.
Seriously, if you’re running a Pocket PC PDA, something like Sprite Backup is an absolute life saver. True if you’re syncing your calendar and contacts to a desktop your information is relatively safe, but even then it still does take a lot longer to rebuild if you have to manually reinstall all your applications – Sprite Backup does the lot. The backup each morning is a bit annoying at times, but I’ll happily take that instead of the frustration when invariably the Pocket PC crashes.
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