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Backups are only good if they are seamless and validated. If your backup data gets corrupted, it gives you a false sense of assurance that the world is beautiful. That is what many Palm folks found out.

We at PreCentral receive a lot of tips throughout the day, but more and more over the past few weeks our inbox has been flooding with stories of users having just reset or replaced their webOS phones only to find that their Palm Profile did not back up all their data as promised. If you haven’t experienced this issue you’re in the lucky majority, but it seems the rate of the backup failures is accelerating and spreading.

We do feel your pain – one of our own staff members was hit by this bug and lost all of his contacts, calendar events, memos, and tasks. The only thing that was saved were his apps, which is a small consolation when you’ve just lost hundreds of phone numbers and email addresses accumulated over the years.

While we’re waiting for a third-party backup solution to land, we did some investigating. It turns out that the problem stems from corrupted backups, which is nothing new in the backup industry. Corrupted data happens all the time, but there are always safeguards to ensure that it doesn’t corrupt the system. Usually, that’s a prior backup. The issue is that the Palm Profile doesn’t keep anything other than the most recent backup, corrupted or not. Since your phone doesn’t provide any feedback on backups, even when they end up as corrupted, webOS users have no idea whether or not their backup was successfully completed. That is, until you reset your phone and realize that everything is lost

Sounds to me like another case of corrupted data. Palm doesn’t keep versions of backups but the most current so you can’t roll back to an older data backup. The better solution could be to rely on Google Sync to sync your Google Calendar,Contacts and Gmail to your smartphone.

Here in my OS comparison guide, you will see that almost all smartphone in the market support Google Sync, which is like a poor man’s Exchange Calendar,Contacts and Mail sync.

Even then, it is useful to backup/export your contacts to a local harddrive at a comfortable interval.

Backup your Google Contacts

Backup your Google Contacts

I put my Google CSV Backup in a Dropbox folder and thus i am really backing up my contacts to 2 sets of Cloud Computing Data Servers that have redundancy. The chances of both failing at the same time would be perhaps a serious powerdown in the whole of US or a serious nuclear attack.

The most important i feel are your Contacts that you use to call. It is a fucking hassle to restore that. It would be a good idea to back them up.