I Feel Like A Friend Has Let Me Down: Palm Problems
I have been a user of Palm connected organizers my friend Josh Berman gave me his old Palm III. Since then I've had a Palm V, and now I have a Palm Treo 650 smartphone for three years. I love Palm. I evalgelize Palm. I trusted Palm. Now something has happened, and I feel like an old friend let me down in big way. The feeling is terrible.
All of my calendar entries have vanished on my Palm Desktop. Thinking a synch would fix it, I then lost all fo them on my handset. This means that all future appointments are gone (including reminders for vaccinations, buying father's day gifts, anniversaries, many birthdays, etc.) but also my rich history, which my Palm had faithfully held since 1997.
It was nice to be able to search for when I had doctor visits, or when I first met someone, or just to peek back to August 2002 to see what I was up to. Now it's all gone.
I didn't have it backed up. And why not? Two reasons.
First, I felt no need. The desktop was a backup of the handset, and the handset was a backup of the desktop. That was the whole point.
Second, the Palm data is not kept in the documents folder. The documents folder is one thing I really like about Windows. Rather than spreading all of your stuff about the installed programs that made it, you just save all your stuff to "Documents." Unfortunately, not all programs want to play ball, and you end up getting your important data that you should back up scattered around your hard drive. In this example, my Palm data was under C:\program files\Palm\users\JDavies. My bookmarks are saved under the program files for the browers. So when I back up my stuff, I can't just backup the documents folder, which would make an enormous amount of sense. I need to think of all of the other niggling little places where I might have important data. I hereby encourage all software developers to save personal data to the user's Documents folder.
Looking on the web, I see that a few others have had the same problem. It's got to be some kind of bug with the Palm Desktop. If anyone has any idea of recourse for getting the data back, I would love to hear it (jim@jimdavies.org). But I fear the information is gone forever.
I feel a great loss, and I'm not being dramatic or funny about it. I was in tears yesterday over this.
Comments
*hug*