Tip: Verify Your Backup Software

Posted on December 28, 2007 by LJ Earnest
Categories: Techniques

Originally published as “Monday Methodology: The Importance of Backups and Checkpoints” on 13 Nov 2006.

I lost power on my PDA yesterday. Not a problem, usually, since I use Backup Buddy VFS. Unfortunately, I also changed devices about 14 days ago, and I could not get my backup to restore.

So now I am going through and resetting my categories on Meetings, Contacts and Tasks. Not fun.

Lesson learned: have a good backup program (Hotsynch does not back everything up), and make sure the backups are usable.

Update December 2007:

In order to make category resetting less painful, I do it using the original Palm desktop. It allows me to select many items and change the categories all at once.

Also, always make sure your backups are usable! I discovered recently that my password database is corrupt in my backup files. Luckily I had backups on my hard drive.